I'm old enough that as a kid, my great uncle Fran used to tell me first hand stories of the Great Depression. My grandfather would walk the railroad tracks as a kid, picking up bits of metal to sell for scrap to get bread. This central banking money system is fucked. Yields have progressively spiked and dropped within lower bounds for the last four decades. Now the bound is near zero.

Central banks are pushing on string. That said, the economy is magic. It heals and transforms. People trade, build, and create. IMO in a very real way, what will die off in this next decade needs to die off. It was on life support anyway.

My biggest worry is that skyrocketing unemployment will lead to populism, nationalism, and conflict. There's going to be fertile ground for that bullshit. But, as far as the economy goes, I think the world has a real opportunity to rebuild with one that is less top-heavy. I see crypto as a fundamental building block of that. Institutions of trust have been the focus of economic exploits. That's Bernie's whole bang. My prediction is that in the next decade, Central Bank hi-jinks will continue to prove ineffectual at best, and an organic token-based economy will grow parallel to it.

I firmly believe that "single payer" would get a lot more support if people stopped talking about it in grandiose themes and noble vignettes and started talking about it in real terms. All the liberals I know are in heavy favor of "single payer" without any of them knowing what the fuck it is.

HERE'S WHAT THE FUCK IT IS.

I've got a medical facility - Al's Medicine. Al's subcontracts to Betty the Biller and Cindy the Client Specialist. I operate in a state where my medical facility is covered by Medicaid. We also take private (employer-provided) insurance, which is underwritten by the following insurance firms: Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, X, Y and Z.

Al's must sign individual contracts with Q, R, S, T, U, V and W. These contracts are "take it or leave it" binding: they say that for ICD code 1, Q will pay Al's $7.50 but for ICD code 1.000000001, Q will pay Al's $0.00 because fuck you, Al's. Note that Q might pay Joe's $6.50 or $9.50 or pi.ie^2 for ICD code 1. Q is entirely within its rights to do so. Al and Joe, on the other hand, are contractually forbidden from discussing their rates for ICD Code 1. If Q gets wind that Al and Joe know what the other are getting, they can drop both because fuck you, Al and Joe. Also know that Joe might not get anything for ICD Code 1 because Q has decided that all of Q's contracted healthcare clients can drive 75 miles to Al's for those services because fuck you, Joe. Also know that Q can tell Al's they'll pay $7.50 for "services" verbally and in writing, but when the actual contract comes through the actual number listed is $2.25 because fuck you, Al's. Also know that they won't tell you what ICD codes they'll pay for, they'll just say "services" and let you resubmit your bills over and over and over again until you find the ICD code that pays out the most because fuck you. Also know that the ICD code they choose to pay for can and will also change because fuck you.

A few other notes: Al's might have to provide, for example, rhogam shots to prevent babies from dying from blood type incompatibiliy. These rhogam shots might cost Al's $28 but Q is going to pay $7 because fuck you, Al's. If you ever wondered why hospitals charge you $40 to hold your baby it's because they're trying to claw back the $21 the insurance company isn't paying for medicine they're required by law to administer (for example). Also note that your involvement, gentle consumer, starts when you get an "explanation of benefits" from the insurance company listing all the outrageous charges the doctor hit you with. It will provide no explanation. It will show how generous they were in all their disbursements and then show you that your doctor's office is going to bill you STILL MORE MONEY because they're such bloodsuckers.

This is where Betty Biller and Cindy Client Specialist come in. Betty makes 10% by pickaxing all the money she can get out of Q. Betty's whole job is knowing what Q pays out on. Betty knows which ICD codes Q pays out what on, and can turn your "normal child checkup" into 42 different codes that pay the maximum rate Q has contracted to pay. She is literally a medical billing bounty hunter. Betty is the back office side while Cindy talks to you, the client - here's what's coming, here's what it means, here's how to get your insurance to pay for this ahead of time, here's how to get preapproval for that.

For those keeping track at home, billing specialists outnumber doctors 2:1 in this scenario.

Multiply times insurance companies R, S, T, U, V and W, who all have their own rates, all have their own codes, all have their own geographic exclusion areas, and probably have seven or eight sub-plans so that it's not actually "V" it's V.a, V.b, V.c, V.d, V.e, V.f and so on. Suddenly, Betty and Cindy look positively useful and you will pay them gladly because the act of billing for care takes three to four times as many man-hours as actually providing that care. Betty and Cindy make good livings and their existence is entirely parasitic on the insurance companie's deliberately opaque, byzantine and antagonistic reimbursement practices.

Not Y and Z, though. Y and Z contract through Medicaid. Medicaid has no patience for that bullshit. They will pay the following amounts on the following ICD codes. Anybody who contracts through Medicaid bills those codes and gets that money. It is known. Y knows, Z knows, Al knows, Joe knows, and all of Al and Joe's clients can fuckin' look it up. And when Medicaid's reimbursements lag behind the real world, it gets turned into a bill that goes to the legislature that raises the rates for everyone.

Al's, in fact, might get better reimbursements out of Y and Z (because of medicaid) than they get out of Q, R S, T, U or V.

Unfortunately you as a patient don't get your insurance through Y and Z because you make more than the poverty level for your county. You get whatever insurance your job provides, which might be V.c, might be Q, might be nothing because you drive for Uber and fuck you.

As a provider, we get to choose who we contract with. We do not get to choose what those providers pay us. And if 50% of your clients work for Microsoft, you bloody well better be able to take V.c, despite the fact that they reimburse at exactly half what Medicaid reimburses at (which is funny, because all your Microsoft mommies make six figures). R, on the other hand, may decide that they'll never cover you because they have enough of your specialty in network, never mind that the nearest provider is a ferry ride away (because this way they don't have to pay for those services).

As an insurer, you get to decide who you contract with. You can pick the providers that are the stupidest, that will accept the lowest rates, that have the lowest conflict rate of you arguing over charges. And you get to discuss this with the HR reps of companies large and small, none of which have any background in medicine, medical billing, accounting or statistics. To no one's surprise, they choose on price.

But the poor people? They pay what the state says they pay, the insurance companies collect what the state says they collect, and they contract with the providers the state says they contract with.

THEY STILL MAKE MONEY.

They're still private insurance companies, privately managing your health care, privately paying out private doctors. It is not "socialized medicine." It is not "universal healthcare." It is not the National Health Service. The healthcare industry is something like a tenth of the US economy; you're never getting that. But you go single payer and all of a sudden things go from back-room knife fights between Q, R, Betty and Cindy to state-mandated pricing and state-mandated coverage.

My future is tied to health care. I've got more in a medical practice than you have in your house.

And I'm a big booster of single payer.

And so's Aetna, who in this example is R.

This is a classic lolbrooks, observing the problem and blaming the victim.

I think I'm the last person left in America who thinks that our problems are not all that hard to solve. The majority of our economic struggles correlate very closely with banking deregulation and tax policy changes, both of which have redistributed money upward.

To be entrepreneurial requires dynamism. Much like combustion requiring both fuel and oxygen, starting a business requires people (fuel) and money (oxygen). The banks have no incentive to create easy money for businesses, because they can make a fuckload doing dumb shit like using your deposit to buy securitzed debt. So business owners have to go to venture capitalists for money, and for those of you who don't know what a venture capitalist is, it's what you call a loan shark who wears really expensive suits and has friends in Congress.

People, being immutable in their desire for a better life, will always be entrepreneurial, if we let them. This is just as true today as it was when someone invented the wheel. When the number of people doing this decreases dramatically, we can ask, as Brooke does, "What's the matter with people?" (Who haven't changed in millenia until, according to Brooks, 1985.) Or we can ask, as we should, "What's the matter with the current climate?"

Policy changes that once again deny banks the ability to gamble with deposits, and tax changes that encourage investments in small business would break this cycle tomorrow. As long as it's more profitable for banks to make risky bets on financial instruments that don't actually correlate to anything manufactured or any real service rendered, then they are going to continue to do that.

Oh, there's no question it won't get built. For 3 reasons:

1. It's impossible. The reason there is not a contiguous wall now, is because the terrain does not allow a contiguous wall to be built. Something like 900 miles of that border is simply the Rio Grande River. Rivers move. Walls don't. So if you build the wall far inland inside of America (thereby walling off any American access to the Rio Grande itself, bythefuckingway), to try and put the wall far enough away from the river that the river doesn't eventually wash up against the wall and undermine it and make it fall over.

2. It will make the US smaller. You can't build the wall in Mexico, because you don't own Mexico. But there are thousands of American's property who bump up against the border. Now you need to pay every one of those people to take their land (and build a 50-foot wall on the south side, which will block the sun and cause your lawn to die), or even better, seize their land using Eminent Domain! Now, I don't know how well you know Texans, but they ain't gonna take kindly to the U.S. Government coming in a seizing their land and building a big fucking wall (that they don't want) on it. That ain't going to go well for anybody.

3. It's a bogeyman. The "problem" the wall "fixes" is apparently "illegal immigration". Thing is, for the last fifty years, illegal immigration has been going down, and in the last 8 years - due to Obama's truly nasty treatment of immigrants - there is a net outflow of illegal immigrants from America. We LOSE more illegals every year - by their own choice, not through deportations - than we gain.

80% of illegal immigrants arrive in America by fucking airplane, anyway! I don't care how tall or "yuge" your wall is... it ain't stopping airplanes.

A wall can't do anything about the thousands of tunnels that bring people and drugs UNDER the border into America. And this happens in places where we HAVE a well-defended wall, and Border Guards! Build a 50-foot wall in the boonies, and you will find 51-foot ladders. (There's a great Border Guard podcast that talks about when the current wall was raised from 13 to 20 feet. They collected so many 21-foot ladders they ran out of ROOM at the border guard's dispatching offices.)

Not to mention that every single agricultural business from Arizona to Ohio is going to have a fucking conniption when they can't get enough seasonal workers to pick their harvest before shit goes bad. Because I guarantee you that perky little cheerleader Madison and high school track star Curt, aren't going to pick cabbages for $20/day.

No, in short, the wall will never be built. Because at some point, some business has to place a bid for the project (or their part of it). Their engineers will go out there, look at the terrain, design something that will kinda hold up under most conditions (see: New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina to see how well THAT works out) and the numbers don't balance.

Illegal immigration MAKES the US an enormous amount of money. Cutting off that flow of money will affect big business, and those people will go knocking on the Oval Office door, and have some very nasty words to say to Tinyhands McDickpunch.

The economy is the American God. If you fuck with the economy, you go down. Period.

"here are the facts, your interpretation is invalid because you're privileged."

That's actually exactly what it was invented for

Goddamn it.

An inner city psychiatrist sees 20-40 people a day. 15 minute med checks, which in a city is 5 or 10 minutes. "Any major symptoms? Suicidality? Side effects? Here's your refill." You try and pull that off in a suburban area and the Feds will be shooting your dog to access your backdoor.

I knew that guy. Compass Mental Health. There, and he was also the one lone psychiatrist at the rural clinic in Gray's Harbor County. He also did some private practice for the rich kidz. Rich kids? 90 minutes. Downtown Seattle? 10 minutes each. Gray's Harbor? 5-7 minutes, once a week. In '97.

And there's plenty of money to be made for the entrepreneurial. If you want to be rich in inner city psychiatry (and you don't have to be a doc), you open a clinic and hire 1 psychiatrist and lots of (talk) therapists, usually social workers. Medicaid will pay for 1 therapy visit per week (around $60/hr) and a 15 minute med check with the doc ($40/visit). The doc usually gets salaried but proportionally takes 50% of that. Let him have it all. The therapist, however, gets very little-- $20/hr.

Goddamn it. Yep. Social workers were making $17 an hour. And he was making enough to justify driving eight hours round trip every week for one day a week. Doing state work.

Fuck you. Badged.

Pretty much every CGP Grey video. I like Numberphile, Periodic Videos and I'm starting to watch Sixty Symbols. I stumbled across this School of Life channel. I'm just gonna embed this one because I made a point to watch it today and it'll save me clicks.

Here's why things don't get better.

'member Occupy Wall Street? Bunch of privileged white people whining about how their privilege was less than the privilege of other white people? There was no racial angle there, no history of oppression. It was simply "I am oppressed by your wealth." They weren't wrong, either - the grievances of the OWS movement were documented and genuine.

But what do?

George Packer wrote a succinct history of Occupy Wall Street in The Great Unwinding whereby he pointed out that there was no central platform, no unifying message, no set of concrete demands for the OWS movement to act on. What did they want? Something something rich people less rich. When did they want it? NOW! But how? HOW did they want it?

embarassed silence

So here we are. mk expresses regret and concern, and you want someone to,

admit responsibility for undoing the privileges and advantages granted to him by systemic racism.

thenewgreen wants something actionable, and you've got

It's taking responsibility for your personal experiences the moment you become aware of these things. If you're white, you dont shutup when your peers say ignorant things about others. You dont shutup when they try to leverage systemic privilege against others.

So in response to two direct questions, you've got, essentially, acknowledge the problem as your solution. Yet in two posts of people "acknowledging the problem" you state

But white people refuse to listen because it is invisible to them

Complaints and a bunch of "wow that's fucked up," but a lot more "oh well, not my problem did you see Game of Thrones?"

But as all of this continuous activism and incident after incident has shown, it is literally near impossible to hold any of these people responsible. And that difficulty is compounded by the white majority refusing to acknowledge the issue.

But a flipside to that is when black people get together and do something positive like Black Girls Rock, you see white people offended that something doesn't include them. Those same people are apparently incapable of making the connection "wait...what if this is how all of these people have felt for hundreds of years and we've been ignoring it the whole time."

So let's clear out the straw men. Let's clear out the wiggle language. Let's clear out the veiled hostility and misdirected anger.

Here we are, three white guys, dismayed and upset of the treatment of blacks by white police. None of us are cops, none of us have ever pointed a gun at anyone, and none of us have any more ability to affect the situation than you. Arguably less, in fact: Here we are, going "what can be done?" and your argument is "stop being racist." Despite no demonstrated racism, despite an explicit statement of dismay, despite attempts at affinity for the black community, we're still

1) white

2) privileged

3) to blame.

Despite what you may think, there are very few concrete opportunities for the average white citizen to combat racism and police brutality. Abstract opportunities?

Well, here is one. And your instinct is to lash out at us.

The subtext of this conversation is really simple:

"I, a white person, feel bad about systemic racism and police brutality against black people."

"I, a black person, want you to feel bad because you are responsible."

"Yes, but what can white people do?"

"Feel bad."

"Will that actually change anything? It seems like - "

"Feel bad and accept that you are bad because you are not black."

_________________________________

Make no mistake - I perfectly understand and entirely forgive the impulse to shit on the whole of the white race in circumstances such as this. But I think a lot more forward progress will be made when the act of shitting on the white race is no longer held forth as a solution. 'cuz really? This is all the confronting of racism any of us are going to do today and it's mostly you hating on us for sharing the skin color of people whose acts we condemn. It's akin to berating Iranian Shia muslims for the actions of al shabaab.

Rhetorical skill permits one to win an argument when one does not have the facts. I mod a default. It's the fifth or sixth I've modded. I've been bestof'd something over 100 times and I haven't done much more than modding since 2011. My trophy case says "load more trophies." I was nominated Redditor of the year in 2008, 2009 and 2010. Gifts on my behalf have paid for nearly a week of Reddit server time and Reddit's first podcast is partly about me.

Facts. I haz them.

Here's rhetorical skill:

I'm sorry I offended you.

I think you didn't mean to come across as offensive. I reckon you rarely do. However, based on your response (and previous responses to others - this is a small site), you come across as offensive by mistake with disquieting regularity. Here's why we like Hubski better:

- On Reddit, all you ever get is a downvote. On Hubski, you get a discussion.

- On Reddit, you're a never-seen-before username. On Hubski, you're a precocious-but-prickly homeschooler that I still choose to talk to.

- On Reddit, there's no context to anything. On Hubski, I've watched you trip over your own caltrops so many times that when you took "naive" in an insulting way, even though I didn't mean it that way, it was easier to lance the boil and let you vent.

Feel better?

'cuz here's the thing: Hubski is not a site where you only get to talk to people you agree with. Not only that, but the people you disagree with are around a lot. Again, voice of experience: I've got a long-ass mute list. Several people on there I've tried to come to terms with many times. Can you say the same thing about Reddit? Are there people on there that have rubbed you the wrong way for years but you still have to be civil to them for the sake of the general level of discussion?

(see, I can, but we all mod defaults. Disagreements at that level make the news. Call me a corner case.)

You sound deeply frustrated. I would be, too, if every time I wanted a discussion I got a fight. But think about it for a minute: why do we want to fight you? You came into this completely neutral. You asked what you think is a completely neutral question. With each interaction it became more and more heated until here you are, QQing out in a languorous and verbose fashion.

Do your friends out there in the world say things like "Oh, that's just Waterford, he's like that?" 'cuz the world doesn't. The world takes you at face value - 93% of communication is context. Which means what you type is only 7% of what I'd get off of you if we were standing face to face having a chat. So if you have a hard time face-to-face, online's gonna be rugged.

Which means - sorry, champ - you're 93% made-up in my head. Everyone is. All of us are one-sip-out-of-a-beercan truth. Once you internalize that, you start to choose your words more carefully.

NOBODY started their interactions with you intent on giving you the ratchet. It got there though, didn't it? And we don't really do that much with each other anymore because our 93% has been filled in somewhat by other interactions. We got history. THAT is another reason we like Hubski better.

I've seen several people try and steer things back to normal with you. You don't get that on Reddit, either. But there comes a time when you gotta participate in the process, mate. If you can't have a conversation without ending up on the defensive, perhaps your conversational skills need refreshing. There is no aspect of life that won't improve, trust me.

Again, sorry to make you blow your top. Sorrier that you're having a hard time understanding why. If you've been reading this only to prove how correct your predictions were, stop. I have no skin in this game and if you left after this you'd be just another in a long line of people who come to Hubski thinking that oversharing is the same thing as empathy so they never really learn how to talk. I'm speaking to you, 7% person to 7% person, in an attempt to uncloud your eyes from the humanity. It's nice here. We get along. When we don't, we rarely call each other motherfuckers.

Go or stay. Up to you. Generally when we see someone making dire exclamations they've made their mind up and it's beyond our influence. I don't know how many hours of server time I've burned personally trying to get people to stay. Rest assured there's no reward. Yet I do it anyway. So does everybody else.

Because Hubski is better.

Don't change a thing. On this particular issue, you nailed it in one.

Here's what you get by publishing the follower relationships:

1) You can see the blocs that make Hubski function

2) You remind the user of their clout, or lack thereof

3) You establish a concrete, human relationship in a void of digital nothingness

4) You provide feedback beyond stupid hubwheels as far as ones performance

5) You inform the user of Reddit influxes

WOULD YOU LIKE TO KNOW HOW REDDIT BECAME 4CHAN? Okay, twist my arm.

So there was a time when kickme444 didn't work for Reddit, and thought I was awesome. Had dinner with his family and everything. For those of you who don't know, K and 5Days created Redditgifts from scratch in a weekend and were running it all on their own (albeit with server time provided by Reddit). This is important - Redditgifts was a layer of personalization independent from Reddit. If you look at a user's Redditgifts page, you will see far more than their recent posts, their trophy chest and their karma. You will see an "about me" page. There's space for a picture. There's all the human stuff one would expect from, say, Blogger, Myspace, Facebook, anywhere normal.

I was also working with honestbleeps at the time, poking around RES and stuff. Meanwhile, I'd been chatting with a few of the Admins about how to make the horrible raiding that was then becoming de rigeur less prevalent. And it all sort of clicked into place: If RES had a plugin that, WITH PERMISSION, pulled a user's Redditgifts profile whenever a Reddit user clicked on someone else's Reddit page, all of a sudden that username would become a lot more human. If they wanted. If both sides specifically asked for it.

Behold. Human Reddit.

Then, of course, Reddit bought out Redditgifts, Jedberg left for Netflix and the whole thing collapsed into oblivion. I read kickme444 the riot act about it and we don't talk anymore.

If I haven't mentioned it before, I've been remiss: the fact that you included an "about me" page FIRST OFF, with no prompting, is probably the one thing that impressed me the most about Hubski. And yeah - I haven't filled mine out. I still get change password requests on my Reddit account. I've still got stalkers. I've still got people trying to dox me. But I'm a special case - I'm a professional asshole with years of experience. The point being: had Reddit had something like your userpage when it began, it would be a very, very different place.

Hubski needs to be a different place than Reddit. It already is. I think it's a dire mistake to make the place less personal - if you feel guilty unfollowing someone, GOOD. That means you're anthropomorphizing them. Every person on the internet who thinks of other people as people is pushing the darkness back just a little bit more.

Doing socially antagonistic things should carry a socially antagonistic penalty. When I act like an asshole I should be aware that I'm losing followers.

Leave it alone.

I'll say this:

A good relationship is not additive, it is multiplicative.

Whereas the majority of the relationships I was in prior to my wife involved giving and taking, whereby the time I invested paid off in benefits I reaped, the time I've invested in my wife pays off in spades. If it weren't for my wife, I would not have

A) Moved to Hollywood

B) Bought a motorcycle

C) Bought a Kyma

D) Had a kid

E) Written a novel

A decent relationship does one fundamental thing: it increases you. It gives you a larger place of stability from which to strike. It increases your faith in yourself, while also giving you something to fight for. I say all those things that she did for me; I also did some little things for her like "pay for medical school" which, honestly, become afterthoughts. That which you give to a relationship that counts becomes trivial; that which you take from a relationshop that counts becomes magical.

I'll say this also: You can be happy if you're not in a relationship. I'll even go one further: You will not have a happy relationship if you are not happy first. This is a classic mistake made by, well, everyone: "I'm unhappy and lonely. I need to find someone to be with." Thing of it is, if you're looking for someone else to make you happy and not lonely, you will FAIL. Until you have more of you than you can really use up on your own, you have no goddamn business expecting someone else to fill you up.

Finally, I'll say this: Every career I've ever had started life as a hobby. I've had an epic string of bad-ass jobs, and it's primarily through ensuring that my reach was further than my grasp. You will always have more fun, you will always impress more people, you will always learn more, and you will always make a greater mark on the world if you almost succeed at something noteworthy than if you hit something safe out of the park. Nobody gives a shit for bunters.

You ever seen Tin Cup? Probably not. Not a lot of reason to watch golf movies. Lemme just say that I don't play golf, and I love that movie. Put it this way - anything with Kevin Costner, Renee Russo, Don Johnson and Cheech Marin can't be all bad, right? The reason I bring it up is the last line is something I really take to heart. I won't spoil it for you.

And I won't give you further advice, other than to say that until your life is complete, you will never have a complete relationship... and that no one should go through life without feeling complete.

Follow your bliss, damn the torpedoes, 2nd star on the right and on 'til morning, bring me that horizon.

"Get busy livin' or get busy dyin'."

- Red, The Shawshank Redemption