Sludgehammer

Sludgehammer, 13 days ago

I’d really love it if they did like some countries and added the sales tax(es) to the sticker price in stores too

Sludgehammer, 23 days ago

Windows 10 is pretty crappy but tolerable, everything I’ve seen about 11 suggests it’s a utter shit show.

Sludgehammer, 1 month ago

Tesla should seek to oust Elon from the company.

They can’t. The only thing propping up the ludicrous stock price is the myth of “Elon Musk, Super genius” and the legions of Musk fanboys. If they kick Musk out they lose both and the stock will tank. So they’ve got to keep him in place, even as he runs the company into the ground.

Sludgehammer, 1 month ago

The 67-year-old chair of the real estate company Van Thinh Phat was formally charged with fraud amounting to $12.5 billion — nearly 3% of the country’s 2022 GDP.

Wow, when your fraud starts being measured in “percentage of GDP” you know you got too greedy.

Sludgehammer, 1 month ago

with more than 100,000 followers on X who liked her increasingly worrying messages.

It’s all happening on X!

Sludgehammer, 1 month ago

Eh, at least this will reduce the amounts of PFAS being produced. I mean, teflon pans at least actually have a useful purpose, rather than things like PFAS coated burger wrappers.

Sludgehammer, 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

So let’s see:

Ivermectin: Relatively low toxicity de-wormer

Fenbendazole: Relatively low toxicity de-wormer. However, it was actually investigated as a possible chemotherapy drug… but didn’t produce notable results.

Aprocot seeds: Contain cyanogenic glycosides

Soursop tea: Contains annonacin, a neurotoxin linked to Parkison’s disease.

Chlorine dioxide: Fuck no. Bleach/sterilizing chemical.

Dandelion root tea: Not gonna cure your cancer, but apparently fine?

Frequency therapy: Run of the mill “healing with tones” quackery

Antineoplastons: Never heard of this one. Apparently a term made up by a quack cancer center for some chemicals he found in urine.

I also find it amusing that they’re railing against chemotherapy drugs… while pushing a drug investigated as a chemotherapy drug as well as some quack compounds pushed as chemotherapy drugs. I guess it’s only bad when they’re mainstream, hipster “You wouldn’t have heard of them they’re too underground” chemotherapy drugs get a pass.

Sludgehammer, 2 months ago

Time to dust off this tweet again

Sludgehammer, 2 months ago

The problem is we can’t seem to make contact with anyone who has completed the process.

I really love this line. It’s just so unthinkable to them that the covcit legal rituals don’t work they never even consider the possibility.

Sludgehammer, 3 months ago

I think he was trying to get out of Twitter and wanted to do a real life version of his Dogecoin pump and dumps. You know, talk a big game, hype up how the stock is gonna go to the moon after he brings his genius to bare on the company, then dump the stock and pull out of the deal. However, during the hype phase he managed to say some legally binding things and suddenly found himself forced to honor what he thought was going to be empty hype.

Sludgehammer, 4 months ago

That ad is one of the dumbest attempts at damage control I think I’ve ever seen.

He spends more time on a soap box ranting about COVID-19 and masks then actually addressing what he’s actually in hot water about. It’s literally just “The student violated dress code standards and I’m totally not a racist, BUT LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT THE TYRANNICAL GOVERNMENT MAKING WEAR MASKS OVER THE COVID HOAX!!!”

Sludgehammer, 4 months ago

The thing about sovereign citizens is that the “rules” they’re taught are always so arcane and convoluted that their the conman “teaching” them can always point to something they didn’t do correctly. So people like the one in this post will be told “Oh, you cited the Magna Carta and correctly declared yourself a ship at sea, but you failed to hop on one leg while reciting the ‘Corpus Juris Civilis’ backwards, that means you did it wrong and the State still had power over you.”

Sludgehammer, 4 months ago

The best summary of sovereign citizens I’ve seen is that they treat the law as a djinn that can be bound to their will if they speak the proper legal spells. As such in sovereign citizen world they are completely immune to any sort of legal restraints or obligations, but at the same time they can cast spells to make the djinn prosecute whomever they want.

Sludgehammer, 4 months ago

“What if we ignored what made our platform successful and instead tried to force our product into a already crowded market?” Elon Musk, Tech genius

Sludgehammer, 6 months ago

I really hate the term “simp” but it really fits here. Having legions of people pledging scraps of cash to literally the wealthiest personon Earth is just so… pathetic.

Sludgehammer, 7 months ago

And Crypto once again fails to be a solution for another application. What a shock.

Sludgehammer, 7 months ago

It’s amusing to consider that Musk could have bought one of the many dying alt-right Twitter clones and achieved the same results for billions of dollars less. But no, he had to turn Twitter itself into a dying Twitter clone.

Sludgehammer, 8 months ago

The funny thing is that some medieval bricklayer made a conscious choice here, he could have put that brick paw-print down and made a flawless floor. Now, here we are getting a chuckle out of some unknown bricklayer’s little gag centuries later.

Sludgehammer, 8 months ago

I don’t think it’s even about that, they’re angry because the want to be angry. The why doesn’t matter, if the current right wing outrage du-jour had been… I dunno, left handed people rather than trans people, you’d see all the same people working themselves into a screaming tantrum if a game or movie had a left handed person in it.

Sludgehammer, 8 months ago

I can’t quite see it, but I’m really guessing there’s some sort of money laundering angle here.

Sludgehammer, 9 months ago

For some reason this old Tweet just popped into my head:

https://i.imgur.com/kfeVZAP.jpg

Sludgehammer, 10 months ago

Article text :

By Liran Einav and Amy Finkelstein

Dr. Einav is a professor of economics at Stanford. Dr. Finkelstein is a professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

There is no shortage of proposals for health insurance reform, and they all miss the point. They invariably focus on the nearly 30 million Americans who lack insurance at any given time. But the coverage for the many more Americans who are fortunate enough to have insurance is deeply flawed.

Health insurance is supposed to provide financial protection against the medical costs of poor health. Yet many insured people still face the risk of enormous medical bills for their “covered” care. A team of researchers estimated that as of mid-2020, collections agencies held $140 billion in unpaid medical bills, reflecting care delivered before the Covid-19 pandemic. To put that number in perspective, that’s more than the amount held by collection agencies for all other consumer debt from nonmedical sources combined. As economists who study health insurance, what we found really shocking was our calculation that three-fifths of that debt was incurred by households with health insurance.

What’s more, in any given month, about 11 percent of Americans younger than 65 are uninsured. But more than twice that number — one in four — will be uninsured for at least some time over a two-year period. Many more face the constant danger of losing their coverage. Perversely, health insurance — the very purpose of which is to provide a measure of stability in an uncertain world — is itself highly uncertain. And while the Affordable Care Act substantially reduced the share of Americans who are uninsured at a given time, we found that it did little to reduce the risk of insurance loss among the currently insured.

It’s tempting to think that incremental reforms could address these problems. For example, extend coverage to those who lack formal insurance. Make sure all insurance plans meet some minimum standards. Change the laws so that people don’t face the risk of losing their health insurance coverage when they get sick, when they get well (yes, that can happen) or when they change jobs, give birth or move.

But those incremental reforms won’t work. Over a half-century of such well-intentioned, piecemeal policies has made clear that continuing this approach represents the triumph of hope over experience, to borrow a description of second marriages commonly attributed to Oscar Wilde.

The risk of losing coverage is an inevitable consequence of a lack of universal coverage. Whenever there are varied pathways to eligibility, there will be many people who fail to find their path.

About six in 10 uninsured Americans are eligible for free or heavily discounted insurance coverage. Yet they remain uninsured. Lack of information about which of the array of programs they are eligible for, along with the difficulties of applying and demonstrating eligibility, mean that the coverage programs are destined to deliver less than they could.

The only solution is universal coverage that is automatic, free and basic.

Automatic because when we require people to sign up, not all of them do. The experience with the health insurance mandate under the Affordable Care Act makes that clear.

Coverage needs to be free at the point of care — no co-pays or deductibles — because leaving patients on the hook for large medical costs is contrary to the purpose of insurance. A natural rejoinder is to go for small co-pays — a $5 co-pay for prescription drugs or $20 for a doctor visit — so that patients make more judicious choices about when to see a health care professional. Economists have preached the virtues of this approach for generations.

But it turns out there’s an important practical wrinkle with asking patients to pay even a very small amount for some of their universally covered care: There will always be people who can’t manage even modest co-pays. Britain, for example, introduced co-pays for prescription drugs but then also created programs to cover those co-pays for most patients — the elderly, young, students, veterans and those who are pregnant, low-income or suffering from certain diseases. All told, about 90 percent of prescriptions are exempted from the co-pays and dispensed free. The net result has been to add hassles for patients and administrative costs for the government, with little impact on the patients’ share of total health care costs or total national health care spending.

Finally, coverage must be basic because we are bound by the social contract to provide essential medical care, not a high-end experience. Those who can afford and want to can purchase supplemental coverage in a well-functioning market.

Here, an analogy to airline travel may be useful. The main function of an airplane is to move its passengers from point A to point B. Almost everyone would prefer more legroom, unlimited checked bags, free food and high-speed internet. Those who have the money and want to do so can upgrade to business class. But if our social contract were to make sure everyone could fly from A to B, a budget airline would suffice. Anyone who’s traveled on one of the low-cost airlines that have transformed airline markets in Europe knows it is not a wonderful experience. But they do get you to your destination.

Keeping universal coverage basic will keep the cost to the taxpayer down as well. It’s true that as a share of its economy, the United States spends about twice as much on health care as other high-income countries. But in most other wealthy countries, this care is primarily financed by taxes, whereas only about half of U.S. health care spending is financed by taxes. For those of you following the math, half of twice as much is … well, the same amount of taxpayer-financed spending on health care as a share of the economy. In other words, U.S. taxes are already paying for the cost of universal basic coverage. Americans are just not getting it. They could be.

We arrived at this proposal by using the approach that comes naturally to us from our economics training. We first defined the objective, namely the problem we are trying but failing to solve with our current U.S. health policy. Then we considered how best to achieve that goal.

Nonetheless, once we did this, we were struck — and humbled — to realize that at a high level, the key elements of our proposal are ones that every high-income country (and all but a few Canadian provinces) has embraced: guaranteed basic coverage and the option for people to purchase upgrades.

The lack of universal U.S. health insurance may be exceptional. The fix, it turns out, is not.

Sludgehammer, 10 months ago

So are ostriches and their meat looks like this (image stolen from American Ostrich Farms)