This is exactly what newbies experience when trying to photograph the moon from Earth. It's not intuitively obvious, but the light coming off the moon is essentially full-daylight bright. But the moon is small against a very black background, and depending on how the auto-exposure is operating, this often leads to guessing that the scene as a whole needs a lot more exposure.

I imagine that trying to photograph the Earth when a significant part of what's in view is experiencing daytime, is very much the same thing.

Yes, I think that we'd all be better off if every person was allowed to have their own personal values, deciding what's more important to themSELVES, rather than piling on and trying to force every one into a one-size-fits-all solution.

For my part, I'd much rather have people wishing me "have a rich and fulfilling life" rather than "be timid and careful to maximize your time even if it's boring and unrewarding".

Sure, you can disagree with my priorities, but that's the whole point. We should each be able to have our own priorities.

It seems that in modern times, humans focus on safety almost to the exclusion of everything else. As much as the more traditional salutations "godspeed" or "have a nice day", we're even more likely to hear "drive safe" or "have a safe trip" or "be safe".

We're very nearly paralyzed by insisting that everything must be maximally safe. Surely you've heard the mantra "...if it saves just one life...".

The optimal amount of tragedy is not zero. It's correct that we should accept some risk. We just need to be up-front and recognize what the safety margins really are.

But for Medicare/caid, there's an ADDITIONAL layer of work that CMS requires Providers to perform. The Providers need to ensure they're compliant with all kinds of standards, and jump through hoops to document and prove to CMS that they're compliant. These standards aren't limited to the specific care - procedures, meds, etc. - being expended on a particular patient. They encompass the entirety of the Provider's operations. For example CMS makes Providers provide documentation about their average pay rates, stuff that's not related to the care of any given patient.

The existence of that additional layer of reporting and compliance is the work that they're offloading onto the Providers, and thus increasing costs of providing care without it being legible if you were to audit CMS's own expenses.

Coding is a different layer. Everything needs coding, whether for gov't or commercial payers. So the folks doing this coding can't be separated out for commercial. In fact, it's kind of the opposite:

CPT codes (for procedures) - these are defined by AMA, but mandated by CMS (i.e., Medicare/caid). Because the gov't mandated them, the commercial payers adopted them too.

HCPCS codes (equipment and supplies) - defined by CMS.

ICD-10-PCS codes (hospital inpatient stuff) - defined by CMS.

versus nothing. Hospitals don't have to maintain a whole team for UnitedHealth, or for Anthem, etc.

This is my point. Medicare cooks the books to look more efficient by offloading their administrative costs onto providers. Other payers can't do that because, even if huge, they don't operate at the same scale.

Think about it: we often hear on the news about disputes about contracts when a local hospital's agreement with some insurance company comes up for renewal. They play hardball, getting local news to run stories on how many people will be affected if they can't come to terms. But you'll never hear this in the context of Medicare/caid. Hospitals have leverage to negotiate with commercial payers, but not with the government.

There's a common, misleading, claim that Medicare is more efficient because they spend far less than commercial insurance on overhead like claims processing. This claim is true. But the impression that it gives is absolutely the opposite of reality. The reason that Medicare doesn't spend as much on admin is that they offload all of this work onto the providers. Every hospital in America has a "Medicare Reimbursement" team. A moderate-sized hospital is going to have something like 2 FTEs focusing just on the reimbursements from Medicare and Medicaid. And that's a lot more work than just filing the right forms for each case. There's a ton of additional work. Each spring they have to file a HUGE "Medicare Cost Report", requiring a couple of months of work to get all the data in place for it. (Source: my wife was "Director of Reimbursement" at various hospitals for quite a few years, before going into consulting.)

That Medicare Cost Report that I mentioned is, beyond a huge effort sink, the source of many other evils. Because of the amount of work that's needed to gather and collate all this data, hospitals naturally structure their Accounting around the way Medicare wants them to report. The thing is, that's largely orthogonal to the way a rational person would do cost accounting. The result is the common criticism about how widely varying the cost of a given specific line-item is between hospitals: they don't really know how much a given procedure costs because that's not how they track their expenses, so they apply some allocation heuristics, and every hospital does that a bit differently.

There are also various perverse incentives in the system. For example, Medicare is smart enough to know that it costs more to deliver care in NYC or SF and so forth. Every locale has a Cost Index that scales how much they expect to need to pay. This leads to hospitals needing to show that their expenses are higher so they should be classified into locale X rather than neighboring locale Y.

Another one my wife told me about her hospital: Medicare realized that a lot of UTIs were hospital-acquired, and they rationally said that they would no longer pay for UTI treatments unless the hospital could prove that they were not hospital acquired. Well, maybe that wasn't rational, because with Medicare/caid being such a huge portion of their business, they changed their policy to test for UTI for everyone at admission, so that they could furnish the proof demanded. Think of all that wasted lab work...

So no, Medicare is NOT more streamlined and efficient. It's absolutely, 180-degrees, the opposite of that.

Popular music no longer has any key changes:

From 1960 to 1995, between 20% and 35% of Billboard Hot 100 number one hits in any given year contained a key change. Around the turn of the millennium that rate started to dip until it hit 0% by the end of the 2000s. [1]

I believe that simple 4/4 time has also become more prevalent as compared to more complex time signatures. I don't have as good support for this claim, but the AI tells me "4/4 (simple quadruple) has dominated Western popular music since at least the 1960s, and corpus work suggests that compound and non‑4/4 meters have become less common over time in mainstream styles, implying an even higher proportion of songs in simple 4/4 today.".

Beato is also fond of pointing out how modern music is written by committee, and that modern artists are more a "product" than ever before. From memory, he's pointing out that in the past, the credited writer of popular songs was usually a band, or perhaps a single person. But more recently, the credited writer is a list of multiple people not the band (and in fact, top songs across recent years have been notable not under the name of a band, but of an individual performer).

EDIT: Further querying leads to this as well:

Timbral Variety: The "texture" of sounds. In the 70s, you had a mix of acoustic, electric, and orchestral layers. Studies show a "homogenization of the timbral palette" since the 1960s peak.

Lyrical Complexity: The vocabulary and reading level of lyrics. Analysis of Billboard hits shows the average reading level has dropped from 3.5 to 2.7 (roughly 3rd grade) since 2005.

[1] https://www.cantgetmuchhigher.com/p/revisiting-the-death-of-...

When it's a matter of a spelling error or two, no problem. But too often I find I've got to read something multiple times before I have any idea what my interlocutor is saying.

Is our hatred of "AI Slop" and greater posting traffic worth handicapping our ability to communicate with each other?

This is false. When you have no idea at all what you're talking about, you should just be quiet.

The problems were that (in order of increasing specificity)

(a) We're talking about Marxism here, and Marxism is all about class warfare. Before the Communists her family had been part of the "landlord" class, and thus were enemies of the people by definition.

(b) One uncle was tricked by the anti-rightist movement. If you're not aware of this, it was earlier in Mao's reign. Mao said, essentially, "we know we haven't gotten everything perfect, so tell us what we could do better". Wife's uncle was stupid enough to believe him, the result of which was a 20-year prison sentence, and also his wife being forced to divorce him, and further tainting the family. (Something on the order of 500K to 2M people were persecuted like this.)

(c) Any outside influences were suspect at best, and often de facto proof of espionage. She had an uncle who was a US citizen. And her father had traveled extensively internationally, as a sea captain (never mind the fact it was the PRC government, as the sole employer in China, who put him onto those ships).

(d) Wife's family side had been in theater. One aunt had been in a theater troupe with Jiang Qing (Mao's wife), and knew at least some of her, ummm, lower class history. Putting her, and the rest of the family, in prison kept them shut up and warned them not to talk any further. (This may sound far-fetched, but consider what the Gang of Four was up to during the Cultural Revolution, and that she was a member.)

posting from Shanghai, going back to the 3rd world west in a few days.

You might do well to read, e.g., Shanghai Tears by Pu Gui Yuan to better understand what was happening back in those days. Then again, I don't imagine you can just go buy a copy of it over there.

While the rest of the world was doing stuff like ensuring that as many of its citizens as possible were vaccinated, and letting the population gradually work up to herd immunity so that controls could be gradually loosened, China kept the population at a hard lockdown right to late 2022, and then opened up completely. It was as if they just opened the floodgates.

There were actually people arguing that China was doing this intentionally, with the plan being to thin out the top-heavy aging demographic in the country. I'm not necessarily advocating for this theory, but illustrating that the very fact that there's a colorable argument for it demonstrates how irresponsible Chinese leadership were.

The result was that in my father-in-law's retirement home, literally EVERY caretaker came down with the virus together, which obviously led to most of the residents getting sick. And given the way covid worked, that meant a whole lot of deaths.

Adding insult to injury, his death certificate attributes the cause of death to heart disease. As a matter of policy, all deaths were attributed to any other condition the patient might have had, however trivial, unless covid could be proven. And proving it would involve in declining to properly dispose of the body, paying for the autopsy and so forth. But there's no doubt (having talked to him every day on Skype) that covid is what killed him.

You haven't addressed at all the parts about blacklisting whole families for political reasons, or horrible return-to-normal policies for covid-19 three years ago, or the general pendulum-swing-back-to-evil trend.

For example, I've got a map application on my phone that lets me download maps, widgets, POI lists, etc. from their app store. It seems like enabling that age signal through this exchange is exactly what the politicians are looking for.

My wife grew up in Shanghai, and you'll have to go quite some distance to find someone more critical of the PRC and CCP than she is. And it's with good reason.

She grew up during the cultural revolution, and was largely raised by her grandmother because literally every other person in her extended family was in prison or work camp, not because of anything they had actually done wrong, but for political reasons because the whole family was blacklisted.

And that's not just the old days. Her father died as a direct result of Chinese Covid policy. During the pandemic her cousins still in the country would ask her (on Skype) "is X true?", and largely their perception of what was going on was false. She would exfiltrate encrypted news reports to them - until those started getting blocked. Her dad's estate still has affairs that need to be resolved, but we've decided not to return to China until Xi is gone, as it's just not safe. It doesn't get much airplay, but there are currently a couple of hundred Americans who are being illegally detained in China right now. It's not worth the risk.

My first trip to China was about 30 years ago, shortly after we got married. And back then, I would have said that you were right. Honestly, it felt like for the average person in their day-to-day-lives, the Chinese were less under the governmental thumb than we are. People from the countryside would bring their produce into the city to sell, or cook dumplings and buns to sell on the side of the street - stuff that in America we'd have to get permits for. It seemed that the oligarchy had an understanding with the people: let us control the big picture, and we'll look the other way for the little things. But Chinese politics is a pendulum swinging very widely. From Tienanmen Square and Tank Man, it had swung quite a bit the other way. But today, it's come back 180-degrees. Xi is really trying for a Cultural Revolution 2.0.

These impressions largely match what I hear from other Chinese immigrants - except for Party members, who tend not to want to talk about it at all. I'm afraid that you've been listening to too much propaganda.

At least in popular, mainstream culture, the viewer is heavily invested in the identity of the artist. The quality of the "art" is secondary. That's how we get music engineered by committee. And it's how we get paparazzi, People Magazine, and so forth.

On the other hand, this isn't anything new at all. We've had this kind of thing for decades. Real art still manages to survive at the margins.

The "cubism" example seems like it would be a closer fit to something like stained glass or something. I don't think the thing really understands what cubism was all about. Cubist painters were trying to free themselves from the confines of a single integral plane of perspective by allowing themselves to show various parts of the image from different viewpoints, different times, different styles, etc.

The division of the image into geometric shapes is just a by-product of that quest, whereas the examples here have made it the sum total of the whole piece.

This feels to me like an example of how LLMs still don't "understand" what the art means, and are just aping its facade.