Lou Katz @lou@entropyservice.com

from Cory Doctorow @pluralistic

Americans are living through a multigenerational project of stamping out solidarity and insisting that we only ever view ourselves as individuals, with no stake in the plights of our neighbors. That's how the US got the most expensive, least effective health care system in the world. And even if you are in the vanishingly tiny minority of Americans who are happy with their health care, you live amongst people who are being killed by the system around you.
The health system is a perfect example of how monopolization drives more monopolization, and how that comes to harm the public and workers. Health consolidation began with pharma mergers, that led to pharma companies gouging hospitals. Hospitals, in turn, engaged in a nonstop orgy of mergers, which created regional monopolies that could resist the pricing power of monopoly pharma – and screw insurers. That kicked off consolidation in insurance, which is why most Americans have a "choice" of between one and three private insurers – and why health workers' monopoly employers have eroded their wages and working conditions.
A new study in American Economic Review: Insights puts some quantitative spine in this tale, tracking the relationship between hospital mergers and skyrocketed health-care prices:
https://harris.uchicago.edu/news-events/news/consolidation-hospital-sector-leading-higher-health-care-costs-study-finds?itid=lk_inline_enhanced-template
The researchers investigated 1,164 acute-care hospital mergers, finding that while the FTC only challenged 1% of these, they could – and should – have challenged 20% of them, based on the agency's own criteria for merger scrutiny. The researchers blame the rising costs of hospital care directly on these mergers, and point out that Congress has historically starved the FTC of the budget it needed to investigate these mergers. The annual additional costs to the American people from these mergers exceed the entire annual budget of the FTC.
It's not just hospitals: the entire investor class is hell-bent on spending their way to monopoly. Nowhere is that more true than in AI, where hundreds of billions are being poured into bids to attain permanent dominance through scale. Writing for their excellent AI Snake Oil newsletter, Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor inject some realism into the AI scale hype:
https://www.aisnakeoil.com/p/ai-scaling-myths
Narayanan and Kapoor challenge the idea that throwing more data at large language models will make the better: "With LLMs, we may have a couple of orders of magnitude of scaling left, or we may already be done." They are skeptical that this can be fixed with synthetic data (whose use is limited to "fixing specific gaps and making domain-specific improvements"). They also point out that if returns from data slow, then adding more compute or making bigger models might also be throttled.
They reserve their most skeptical take for "AGI" – the idea that LLMs are going to achieve consciousness. This is a fundamentally unserious idea, one that they unpack in detail in their forthcoming book:
https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691249131/ai-snake-oil
One thing I'm hoping for from the book is some analysis of the material usefulness of AI hype – what purpose does the hype serve? I mean, obviously, hype is useful if you're looking to suck up investor capital, or flip an investment to a greater fool. But there's a specific character to AI hype: namely, the claim that AI will displace labor, which is really a claim that a bet on AI is a bet on the increasing wealth of capital at labor's expense.
In other words, AI is a bet on oligarchy. In America, that's a pretty safe bet, and the odds just got even better, thanks to a string of brutal Supreme Court decisions that legalized bribery, banned most regulatory enforcement, and made being alive and unhoused into a crime (Poor Laws 2.0):
https://prospect.org/justice/2024-06-29-whos-gonna-check-supreme-court-chevron-separation-powers/

via https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic/112701045795458082

#AI #LLM #HealthCare #Capitalism

Why should we care about the Supreme Court killing the Chevron doctrine?

When the next pandemic comes, and the FDA approves a lifesaving vaccine — ANTI-VAXX MAGA JUDGES will be able to overrule the FDA’s doctors and scientists.

That’s why.

The only thing negative I'm going to say about Biden in the debate is to ask why none of the people prepping him didn't think to have him plan to say, in his first answer, "I have a cold, by the way, which is why my voice sounds like this -- but I'm here and I'm doing this debate anyway."

"This is the American story of the past 4 decades: accumulate tech debt, merge to monopoly, exponentially compound your tech debt by combining barely functional IT systems. Every corporate behemoth is locked in a race between the eventual discovery of its irreparable structural defects and its ability to become so enmeshed in our lives that we have to assume the costs of fixing those defects. It's a contest between 'too rotten to stand' and 'too big to care'" @pluralistic https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/28/dealer-management-software/#antonin-scalia-stole-your-car

Subway train, light and dark. West 116th St/Columbia University station on the 1 train. The station is fully underground, but there are some ventilation grates on the sidewalk at street level. When I took this photo, around midday, sunlight was shining almost directly on the part of the train under the grates. Photo taken with an iPhone using raw mode. (1/60, f/1.8, ISO 320)

Texas Supreme Court Says Parental Rights Don’t Extend to Gender-Affirming Care https://truthout.org/articles/texas-supreme-court-says-parental-rights-dont-extend-to-gender-affirming-care/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon

Closing the Stanford Internet Observatory will edge the US towards the end of democracy | John Naughton https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/jun/29/closing-the-stanford-internet-observatory-will-edge-the-us-towards-the-end-of-democracy?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon

There's a famous quote attributed to Mark Twain: "In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then he made School Boards."
https://mastodon.social/@crlamke/112700391964463694

The reality is that the goal is keeping Donald Trump out of the White House. In furtherance to that goal, loyalty to any individual candidate, no matter how noble, must be abandoned if necessary, irrespective of the candidate.

The Nearly $1 Trillion US Military Budget Doesn’t Provide Safety, Only Profit https://truthout.org/articles/the-nearly-1-trillion-us-military-budget-doesnt-provide-safety-only-profit/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon

It's extremely important that logs never be written to a plaintext file--instead, they should go to a special format that requires a custom binary to read because the systemd author hates everything about Unix.

The irony is not lost on me that the Internet Archive went out of its way to acquire the physical versions of millions of books and loan them out carefully and in a limited way, and is facing a near-extinction-level event over it, while for-profit and VC-backed companies are just stealing people’s content and making up excuses to validate the bad behavior.

⚠"iPhones and iPads are not computers," Apple has publicly stated. ⚠

🔔 We should not allow gatekeepers like Apple to threaten our rights and freedoms!

https://fsfe.org/news/2024/news-20240627-01.html

@tofugolem

not just their disposable income

we took as much of their disposable time as well

We spent 4 decades making everyone else poorer so that a small number of wealthy people could get wealthier.

Young people are affected by this more than old people.

We deliberately shrunk the disposable income of the population, then get angry when people buy less stuff.

Big chunks of Texas were under heat warnings this past week — with heat indexes hitting 115°F.

Reminder that Texas Gov. Abbott signed legislation that prohibits cities from mandating employers to provide workers with rest and water breaks.

This is the GOP's vision for America.

Pro-Palestinian protesters are still harassing Biden. Yet last night at the debate, Trump said "Let Israel finish the job" and accused Biden of being a Palestinian because he's been trying to get rabid Netanyahu on a leash. And they plan to protest the Democratic convention. Do they realize they are actually working for Trump, who has promised concentration camps for them? .