There’s something wrong with that company. And Microsoft is deeply involved.

Good article.

I’m fascinated by the abilities current AIs display, but I’m also aware they are in large measure mimicking us humans.

AI stands upon our shoulders.

“Suspicious OpenAI Whistleblower Death Ruled Suicide”—
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/suspicious-openai-whistleblower-death-ruled-suicide
Key graf:
‘… In an October post to X, Balaji wrote: “I was at OpenAI for nearly 4 years and worked on ChatGPT for the last 1.5 of them. I initially didn’t know much about copyright, fair use, etc. but became curious after seeing all the lawsuits filed against GenAI companies. When I tried to understand the issue better, I eventually came to the conclusion that fair use seems like a pretty implausible defense for a lot of generative AI products, for the basic reason that they can create substitutes that compete with the data they’re trained on.…’
[Emphasis mine; Barry M.]

That’s what was done to Trump over the Steele dossier. The legacy media would not at first report it, because it was very dodgy and libel insurance doesn’t pay for every possible thing you might print. Then the FBI briefed Trump on it, and someone leaked to the legacy media that Trump had been briefed on it, and THEN the legacy media was willing to report on Trump being briefed on it, which was the intention behind the FBI briefing in the first place. Trump being briefed was the fact that defended them from libel.

The legacy media is usually reluctant to go with something that really has no source, but if enough people talk about it, then they’re just “reporting the controversy”, and then they are reporting the fact that people are talking about it, which is the fig leaf they need.

Wikipedia is the same with sources. A legacy media source reports it, it can go in Wikipedia. You yourself will not be able to correct a false item about you personally if the false item appeared in a legacy media source and your true item did not.

Very few people pay the full cost of their health insurance. The “payers” are the entities that the health insurance companies actually contract with. The largest payers are the Federal and state governments. After that come individual employers. Some very large employers are large enough they can run their own health insurance, but most of them, even if large, even if they are a health insurance company themselves, pay an existing health insurance company to actually do the administration, and they pay that health insurance company for all the claims incurred by their members.

It’s the payers who are primarily the ones getting frustrated with the rapid increase in health insurance costs, and unlike the individuals covered by health insurance, they can afford teams of lobbyists and lawyers and can afford to pay journalists to run stories about how evil health insurance is.

I’m not sure that it’s the “Left” so much driving a lot of the “health insurance is bad” narrative around this murder, though they’re doing their bit–but what they generally want is UK-style socialized medicine and not all payers would want that. I would guess there’s some large payers, if not actually at back of it, then at least busy stirring the pot.

I think they just wait for these things to happen–school shootings, a black man killed by a white cop, a CEO murdered–and then they set a pre-existing plan in motion.

The government, both state and Federal, wants health insurance companies to deny claims for people covered under Medicare and Medicaid, with the very same motive that the health insurance companies would have. This is why they farm out most of Medicare and Medicaid to health insurance companies, with United being the largest for Medicare. The government does this because health insurance companies, though they pay more per service than the Medicare fee schedule, control utilization much better than the government does, and because they pay more Medicare patients have more access to providers. Patients get better access, providers get more money, the government spends less.

From time to time the media or activists will say that the Medicare people getting their benefits through health insurance companies “cost the government more” than those who get them directly from CMS, but they are (deliberately) not accounting for the difference in utilization (which would be much higher) or access (which would be much narrower) which would apply if all people on Medicare went directly through CMS.

It follows that “Medicare for all” is a lie, and quite a deliberate one. If it were applied to everyone, it would look nothing like Medicare does today. It would pay much more to providers, and it would cover a very different population so the utilization patterns and costs would be totally different. (Exhibit A, Medicare today hardly ever pays for childbirth.) Anyone who talks about “Medicare for all” is really promising to replace insurance as you know it (even if you have Medicare now) with insurance that no one has ever seen before.

That narrative exponentially fuels hatred of capitalism/free enterprise.

Which raises the question, are the greedy insurers the new Trump? Then the bankers? The Obama/Biden/Harris nexus was destroying capitalism/free enterprise through government special interest cronyism. They have been sent to the penalty box for their failure to advance the interests of much of the citizenry.

Are the leftists/marxists driving the Democrat party going to resort to more direct disruptions to the system? Are the two assassination attempts on Trump and the assassination of the United CEO random and will they become more coordinated over time?

The Other Chuck:

Thanks. I try.

I know I have my personal obsessions, but I do try to run my comments through a filter of whether participants will find my writing interesting, or at least not too long.

And I will settle for being mildly amusing. 🙂