I agree overall. That said, there isn't really a difference between 14th Street and the other nearby numbered streets in Manhattan. Market Street connects 2 different grids and doesn't have a clean alternative.
> Chinese acquaintances are rather horrified by how, in the US, cops can use state surveillance systems to stalk women and get away with it and people regularly end up homeless due to medical bills.
This sounds more a product of censorship rather than China being particularly better in those aspects. Police in China are less likely to kill you because guns are uncommon, but they are just as shady if not more, especially in more remote areas. Healthcare access and affordability are also worse than what you'd expect from a communist country. Homelessness in China is definitely a lot worse than what state numbers suggest. They just drive out homeless people who they're less visible.
This is a settlement between Meta and 48 states. Individuals can still sue them for harm, and one notable case had them pay 4.2 million. There are hundreds of thousands of claims pending. The federal government still has the ability to sue or fine Meta as well.
That's their point. Congress isn't going to get $10 million from providing universal healthcare (at least for any system that is any good), so they have no incentive to pass it. The year the ACA passed, Democrats suffered one of the worst legislative defeats in history. Nobody wants to be the person to tell millions of people that they can no longer see their chiropractor for free or that their healthcare is not longer paying thousands of dollars a month for weight loss medications.
There’s a disconnect between what people say they want, and what people actually want.
People say they don’t like the ACA. But if you try to revoke its grants, it’s political suicide. Which is why republicans don’t even try.
Bring back denying insurance for pre-existing conditions? Lower the age for parent-child plans? Can you even grasp just how wildly unpopular either of those would be? Or what about marketplace plans? Congratulations, you’ve just destroyed every small business and entrepreneur in the country. I’m sure that will go over well.
The ACA is universally loved. Yes, everyone likes it. They won’t say that because they don’t know exactly what it gave them, and they’ve taken it for granted. Many of you would be uninsurable without the ACA.
And that’s why, despite people complaining, the republicans do not dare repeal even parts of the ACA. It’s too popular, whether people know it or not.
I suspect a single payer system would be equivalent. It would be contested hard, but once it’s passed, it’s passed. It would become so unbelievably popular for a majority of the population that suggesting a repeal would immediately end your political career.
People talk about policies like they're something like can be picked up off the shelf at supermarket. If you could take the policies and Sweden copy-paste them to the US, then sure, we could save $1T and a hundred thousand lives. This would be a very difficult thing to replicate if you're a country without any existing healthcare system. It is impossible in a country with an extremely mature healthcare system, which accounts for nearly 20% of GDP.
No politician is going to want to deal with the fallout of massive layoffs or millions of people having their coverage changed (e.g. no free chiropractor appointments or GLP-1s for weight loss), especially since the Democrats suffered one of the worst Congressional losses in US history the year the ACA was passed. There are ways to make this transition less painful, but the only people interested in health policy are those who make money from healthcare, so you generally only see solutions that involve throwing money at the problem. We need regular people to develop an understanding of health policy or else we'll end up with a policy that merges the worst parts of a planned economy and capitalism even more than today.
The US already has a national health insurance network that pays the vast majority of all providers, and as far as I know it is widely popular and covers everyone legally present in the US for a portion of their life, Medicare. Old people experience just about every ailment young people do, we can just get rid of the age restriction on Medicare, it's already fully integrated with our medical system. No need to copy-paste from Sweden.
Medicare also isn't something that you can copy paste from covering only old people to everyone. For one, margins from Medicare patients are much lower and often negative for hospitals, and that money has to come from somewhere. Medicare doesn't cover a lot of drugs that people are already used to their private insurance covering like GLP1s for weight loss. Of course, a transition from point a to point B is possible, but there will inevitably be a lot of kinks and bugs to work out, which MFA proponents seem to be unaware of.
Lots of studies have shown that the US spends a much larger portion of our GDP on healthcare than other countries, there is plenty of money to solve this problem already allocated to healthcare. I am aware that Medicare does aggressively negotiate prices, and our current system is a complex mess of different parts of the system subsidizing other parts to keep hospitals somewhat solvent, but this is largely just to enable all of the useless insurance middlemen to take big chunks of the money for no good reason (and its not all yacht money, its also just bullshit jobs that accomplish nothing productive but are sufficiently complex to require expertise, training and pay decent wages in many cases).
And I do know that you mentioned a real material reason why this isn't pushed harder by either political party despite the nearly inevitable massive savings if we pull it off. Causing an upheaval in the job market by removing a bunch of unnecessary admin work has real short-term impacts that will be hard for any US political party to weather well. That being said, I do think there are very real paths to achieving this and rhetoric about needing to copy-paste big parts from other countries distracts from how achievable it is. 90% of the work is already there with Medicare, and expanding the list of covered drugs and having a price negotiation with hospitals to make Medicare a good customer rather than a burden in some cases is definitely possible with some political will. A public option if it had been included in the ACA would have likely moved us a lot closer to universal coverage, especially if the mandate was still enforced, and likely would have spurred some of these necessary discussions.
> rhetoric about needing to copy-paste big parts from other countries distracts from how achievable it is
When have you ever heard "rhetoric" that actually brings up the details of how universal healthcare would actually implemented in practice? If you have an idea at work and a coworker brings up a caveat that you missed, do you dismiss it as rhetoric? If you are to be worried about rhetoric, it should be about how the general public talks about policy like it's sports whereas corporations talk about policy like it's work.
It would fine if it were just internet comments. However, this article is talking about a paper from one of the most prestigious university in the world and yet it's devoid of meaningful analysis. It literally does the "copy-pasting" that I'm talking about.
> Hospital and clinical fees are paid at Medicare reimbursement rates, which are below the rates paid by commercial insurers and above those paid by Medicaid.
> I can't help but shake the feeling that the federal reserve is here for the wealthy, the bankers, and not for the rest of us
Kashkari was part of the minority opinion. The Fed voted to keep rates steady, so I guess that means that the Fed is against the wealthy, bankers, and for the rest us?
It turns out that having lots of money is useful, including at taking advantage of the macroeconomic landscape. In a high interest rate environment, you get free money from yields. In a low interest rate environment, you get free money from leverage.
The Federal Reserve is one of the last competent parts of government. You don't blame the ER doctor for atrophy caused by being hooked to a ventilator after getting a heart attack caused by consuming only fast food. The ER's job is to keep the patient alive by making sure that oxygen is circulating well enough for the body alive. Likewise, the Federal Reserve's job is to make sure that money circulates in a way that keeps the economy alive. It's not their fault if the voters vote for politicians who enact terrible policy.
Our building installed destination dispatch system to their elevators and it seems to help overall. However, it breaks when say a team wants to get lunch together, but only one person presses the elevator button. The elevator thinks that it can keep on accepting new passengers so it stops at floors even though it's already full.
The ocean breathes in and out too. Very little carbon sinks down to the sea floor. The ocean does happen to absorb a lot of CO2, but that's from acidification rather than photosynthesis.
Yes agreed. But the organisms breath "out" much more oxygen than anything else. And yes ocean acidification is both what's driving a massive crisis and saving us from the full impacts of our CO2 output. It's not a pretty picture
You could induce artificial algea blooms. All that needs is iron and light + water soluble co2 and / or o2. If you are greedy you pump light down into the depths , go cubic instead of quadratic?
Intentional oceanic iron fertilization (OIF) is actually well-studied. Unfortunately it carries risks of ecological disruption and can lead to deoxygination (dead zones). Which would long-term hinder our ability to repeat this. It also often leads to methane and nitrous oxide emissions which are both very potent (though shorter lived) greenhouse gasses
Lobbying expenditures are given to lobbyists not politicians. You're primarily paying for the salary of some humanities or social science majors and their travel expenses, which isn't that much money.
This should be a basic fact. If those who spend a good portion of time being angry at lobbyists yet intelligent enough to make mid-six figures conflate bribery with lobbying, it should be no surprise the corporations have captured the government. The general public has essentially zero civic understanding while corporations are able to hire the few that do.
> Lobbying expenditures are given to lobbyists not politicians. You're primarily paying for the salary of some humanities or social science majors and their travel expenses, which isn't that much money.
I don't think these are the only expenses, why should politician listen to them if lobbyists are not promising them support in next elections in the form of marketing, payments for expenses and so on
> why should politician listen to them if lobbyists are not promising them support in next elections in the form of marketing, payments for expenses and so on
Mostly because those things are directly illegal. Lobbying organizations (and PACs and SuperPACs etc.) are very limited in what they can provide either as direct monetary contributions or in-kind gifts to a candidate. The restrictions here are basically the same as those on an individual, but usually with more strict reporting requirements and lower limits.
The marketing aspect is the only thing that they can legally provide, and that's less a lobbying function than a PAC function, and they are not allowed to coordinate with the campaign or the candidate on this.
Well a funding a PAC that supports a specific candidate/party who gets elected because of that effectively accomplishes the same thing. Of course the salary the company "buys" for them isn't exactly in the same magnitude as a direct bribe could potentially be (on the upper end at least).
First, the inability to coordinate with the candidate on marketing doesn't strike me as much of an obstacle to SuperPAC effectiveness. Second, the Supreme Court ruled this summer that political parties cannot be prevented from coordinating campaign spending with candidates in NRSC vs FEC.
Yes, you're right, they could just do this, and then spend the rest of their term thrown out of Congress and rotting in prison.
That is, they can hold such a lunch, but they can't pocket the money personally or even have the money contributed towards their campaign. Pocketing the money personally is just bribery, having it contribute to their campaign would violate the contribution limits (typically ~$10,000 per election max, though less than that in reality because the limit is split between primary and general).
You're right to be slightly suspicious because these lunches do exist. But they don't go to the campaign or the candidate, they can go to PACs and SuperPACs or to the party. In tern, PACs and SuperPACs cannot give this money to the candidate or the campaign (same limits as above with higher reporting requirements) and cannot coordinate campaign messaging.
This is not to say that corruption doesn't exist -- just that this simplistic form of it does not exist. You'll have to dig deeper than looking at lobbying activities to find the actual corruption, and it's usually masked in revolving door arrangements, speaking fees, and bulk sales of vanity books. But none of that can go through the typical lobbying system because it's too tightly regulated and tracked.
> A federal jury convicted Menendez on 16 felony counts. These included bribery, extortion, conspiracy, wire fraud, obstruction of justice, and acting as a foreign agent.
Seems you have to go all out before the comprendes?
It's not as if being elected is the end all and be all to being a politician. Politicians have a vague idea of how they want to shape society, but they can't be experts in completely unrelated subjects of healthcare, military, AI infrastructure etc. A good lobbyist will help a politician achieve these goals in the field of their expertise (or at least try to convince the politician that they're helping).
Why lobbyist can't just present their ideas publicly, like do a public free lessons to politicians and anyone who wants to attend, if they're so eager to teach politicians?
Let them publicly say whatever they're preaching to politicians, and instead of 'funding' politicians directly, let them just teach everyone all at once.
I would love to hear what AIPAC teaches politicians
That's literally what 90% of lobbying is. Powerpoint presentations to Congressional staffers, econometrics research publications, policy panels and conferences, and so on. Not everything is campaign donations and super PACs.
Why any lobbyists should have 1:1 time with a politician, what are they hiding?
For one thing because it’s a right in the First Amendment, there next to freedom of religion and speech.
If you have a grievance, you have a right to petition to have it redressed. Like other rights recognized in the Constitution, courts have interpreted it broadly, to include such things as a right for a private citizen to meet 1:1 with a willing public citizen.
I should think the point was obvious. It's not a percentage of behavior of a single participant, it's in aggregate. The point is 90% of lobbyists are not doing anything untoward.
> Why lobbyist can't just present their ideas publicly, like do a public free lessons to politicians and anyone who wants to attend
Different people (including politicians) have different priorities, assumptions, biases, etc. The argument that convinces one person won't land with someone else. The true value of a lobbyist is her ability to understand what a politician values, and present the argument that is convincing to him.
As an example: I met an EU citizen who thought fishing with hooks was immoral. It seemed cruel to her to put a hook in the fish's face. She traveled to the US to ask senators to ban it. Amazingly, she went to a few effective altruist meetups, networked her way into contacting the staff of two US senators, and managed to get meetings with both of them. But neither one introduced legislation for her.
What arguments could she have made?
1. The vegan argument: It is wrong to eat animals or make them suffer.
2. The environmental case: Humans should leave nature alone.
3. The public safety case: Some rivers have toxins that may accumulate in fish. Only a strict licensing system can keep people from fishing in polluted rivers, selling the fish to people who don't know the river had bad stuff in it, and getting sick.
<<I could come up with many more, but you get the idea...>>
She believed in the vegan argument. No senator agreed with her. A good lobbyist would have told her:
"Senator X cares about the environment. Make the environmental case, and he is likely to listen to you. His constituents are not interested in veganism, and he wins elections by talking about standing up for the interests of ranchers. The vegan argument will not work, do not bring it up!"
Tailoring arguments to your audience can be dishonest if you take it too far. Not tailoring your argument at all is certain to fail: US Senators are busy. Handing them a 60 item list of all possible arguments, some of which they think are crazy, will cause them to ignore you.
I don't have any issues with them teaching politicians, but nothing should be hidden from public. let them do everything in public, because public needs to know what their representatives are doing.
this is also good for documenting and tracing arguments and facts.
At your job, would you like your 1 on 1s to be publicly available to the world? Are you even able to have a productive discussion when you're second guessing how other may react to what you're saying? Now imagine you're a politician with an army of enemies ready to clip anything you say out of context.
> I would love to hear what AIPAC teaches politicians
Thanks for bringing AIPAC up because it illustrates my point. AIPAC has plenty of publicly available material for you to read. It's not going particularly specific, but it most likely broadly aligns with what their lobbyists discuss with politicians: Israel is a valuable intelligence partner, aid to Israel brings stability in the Middle East, Iran is a destabilizing force that needs to be kept in check, etc.
How much merit do these arguments have? Maybe some. Maybe little at all. Even so, there is no mistaking that APAIC is talking about Earth here. The same cannot be said about the pro Palestinian side in America. "Stop funding genocide" is a fundamentally contradictory. The entire basis for a overwhelmingly better armed Israel giving Palestinians any sort of autonomy at all rests on American security commitments to Israel.
Even ignoring financial issues, people are generally willing to talk to major groups or industries. You tend not to get re-elected if you ignore everyone.
> They are interested in learning about topics from credible people
Honestly, you surprised me with this statement alone. interested in learning? do you think Trump wants to learn anything from AIPAC? or Pharma lobby or Military Industrial complex?
What do politicans want to learn from Military Industrial complex or AIPAC lobby for example? What's there, that politicians don't know already?
> > They are interested in learning about topics from credible people
> Honestly, you surprised me with this statement alone. interested in learning?
> do you think Trump wants to learn anything from AIPAC?
> or Pharma lobby or Military Industrial complex?
Trump is unusually sure of himself. But no man rules alone: There is a massive org under every president trying to run a government. I know for a fact that people two levels of management under Trump (i.e. Trump is their manager's manager) do take meetings with people who lobby on the issue of health care policy and (for and against) military procurement. I would be shocked if people who are for/against working with Isreal are never in a room with anyone who can set policy.
Imagine that it is your job to come up with policy for a bug expensive government program: The VA hospital system, a military procurement program that buys airplanes, the part of the state department focused on MENA, etc. If someone asks to meet, claiming that they did academic/technical work which shows you can get a better result with a policy change, you will take that meeting. Examples:
1. An MD researcher shows you can cut drug costs by switching one medication for another.
2. An engineer has reason to believe current stealth coatings on fighter planes won't work against China's missiles in 5 years.
3. An economist thinks that an ally (Isreal, Korea, etc.) have demographics that will stop them from being able to field an army within 20 years.
You should go into these meetings with skepticism, and there is a 90%-99% chance the person's idea is bad. But if an idea is good/correct/important, and you blew him off, your boss will be angry, and your career will be over.
Most people in government want to solve problems (and get credit for doing so). Most problems governments face have hard tradeoffs that voters don't understand/care about. Voters want unlimited healthcare at no cost to themselves, 100% success thwarting terrorists with no spying on citizens, military supremacy without paying much for weapons, etc. People asked to solve these problems are DESPERATE for new ideas to allow voters to see that they are getting good outcomes. Telling them you have a way around a hard tradeoff is music to their ears.
Thanks for the detailed comment. And I would describe lobbying as making sure when the opportunity arises your solution has a voice in that discussion.
Yes it sucks. But this is a human problem. Not a US gov problem.
The faintest whiff of a potential incentive wafted beneath the nose of an entrepreneur is enough to bring into motion the invisible hand. This is HN, that's what we do here. We assume that it is the same for politicians.
Lobbyists are in the business of wafting. It is quite enough for them to bring credible rumors of corporate agenda and plans to spend in pursuit of them. Political entrepreneurs will move to capture that spend without a single back-alley transaction involving burlap sacks of cash with comically large $ signs printed on the side. It has the same effect, though.
That is a hopelessly naive description of lobbying, to the point that I assume you are being intentionally disingenuous. Lobbyists commonly funnel money to politicians via fundraiser bundling, donations to outside spenders like PACs, and other mechanisms that get around the weak remaining restrictions on direct campaign contributions that SCOTUS has not yet gutted. A lobbyist may not donate directly to a politician's campaign, but they get a group of their friends together for a fundraiser to effectively donate on their behalf (bundling). Or they donate to outside groups who then spend to support the politician's campaign, e.g. by funding advertising that benefits the candidate or hurts their opponent. Like when AIPAC sinks millions into ads against progressive candidates, that's tightly connected to their lobbying on behalf of Israel and you better believe that the politicians benefiting from that spending are well aware of how it is connected to their willingness to adopt the lobbyists' positions.
How should politicians be informed on these topics for which they are attempting to regulate? What's the alternative?
I think its entirely reasonable that the industries affected by regulations spend money to combat incorrect information like water usage of data centers.
That isn't entirely accurate. They at least need enough domain knowledge to tell if an expert witnesses is bullshitting them. Or to understand the jargon being used.
What exactly are they trying to accomplish? I doubt they would just abandon the project. They would just redo the concrete which would emit even more emissions.
It’s as productive as people who glue themselves to roadways. It irritates drivers/commuters (who are then more likely to have a negative view of the cause) and it slows traffic resulting in even more fuel usage. Yet, they think they are doing something good.
Are we talking about the environmental impact? Or are we talking about the vandalism perpetrated by activists? Attention on the protestors is not necessarily attention on the protestors' cause.
I mostly see commenters quipping about how this will just mean the concert will have to be re poured, resulting in yet more emissions. The bulk of the comments are about the protestors, not the environmental impact of this data center.
It's literally a building that turns electricity into reasonably intelligent text and we're still here talking about environmental impacts. Is this where we're at with NIMBYism in the West now? Will there ever be popular support to build industrial production any more?
Roadway gluing is designed to sway public opinion -> change politics -> affect the corporations.
This is designed to... affect the corporations. (Swaying public opinion could be seen as a secondary effect.)
I also realize it's not that simple. They probably didn't affect Microsoft here, rather a construction company, who are now calling their insurance company? Or the construction company is eating the cost for the damage, because it's deemed that the site wasn't adequately secured?
Do you know anyone in the arts? Musicians? I see more AI hatred on average in those sorts of communities than in tech, where there's a pretty even split.
I don't know a single person under 80 outside of tech who isn't using ChatGPT or more on a regular basis. If you really think everyone hates it, you are being very selective in your information/opinion sources. Yes 100% of lefty journos probably hate it, but they are an unrepresentative elite, jockeying for cultural power.
Everyone uses it, but how much of the AI opposition do you think pays to use it?
No matter how much HN users want to deny it, the cultural zeitgeist is that using AI is immensely uncool. If you only read HN, you'd think that everyone is already on board and the opposition consists of their favorite ivory tower stereotype of the day.
LLMs are still a very convenient shortcut, so most people can and will use them for small things. But don't make the mistake of extrapolating that and concluding that they then must also be OK with consuming AI-generated media, generating correspondence with their friends and family, accepting the new garbage-filled internet or permitting giant AI infrastructure projects. Young people especially don't tolerate it.
The people around me who seem the most enthusiastic about AI are specifically the non techies using it to make slop images, event flyers, stylized selfies, and asking it if drinking glue is bad for their health.
is it? from where I stand, hn seems to be one of the exceptionally few remaining places where the mods don't take sides so the obnoxious minority doesn't get to win arguments by silencing everyone else like they do everywhere else.
I suppose if you're one of the people that live near where it would be built it might be worth sabotaging it if only to go another week without the incessant hum and brown, filthy tap water.
A port area that uses the same water infrastructure that runs to residential areas, yes. The saboteurs are not named but I would wager that the Dutch group talked about in the article recruited from the area, yes.
In the interest of playing Devil's Advocate, even if they're unlikely to abandon an existing project over this, accounting for potential sabotage and the cost/delays of redoing work might change the calculus of future projects?
