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You know what has radicalized me the most? Getting a fucking math degree and understanding precicely how evil capitalism at large, but insurance companies in particular, is. To see the falsehoods they peddle because the consumers of their propaganda do not know what is being said. To see how they skirt and cheat every guard rail put in place to make sure that there is some level of ethics using statistics and a bit of other math bullshit. It is disgusting, egregious, and downright infuriating.
they love the poorly educated
Same for me. Getting a law degree.
Read tens of thousands of pages. Hundreds and hundreds, probably thousands of cases, law review articles.
Story after story of police and corporate America fucking poor people.
In 2024 there are still companies arguing that asbestos is safe. Anything less than chattel slavery with strict runaway slave laws is insufficient for these psychos.
That's a really interesting perspective. Was that material you sought for personal reasons or a required part of your education? Any specialization involved, if the latter? (I'm pretty ignorant about y'all's schooling)
Good question. I've wondered how people could go to the same schools as I, sit through the same classes, and have wildly different political views. But it's that they come into it with a different lens.
Example, There's a Supreme Court case about a woman who was charged with obscenity for possession of porn. It didn't belong to her. It was her boyfriends, maybe husband. Police came in with a warrant for his arrest, but he wasn't there, and they wanted to squeeze her for information on his whereabouts, so they charged her with possession of porn he had squirreled away in the basement.
You're could read that and be like "good, the police had a warrant and she should have cooperated, she had her turn in court and was convicted of possessing it, and we might disagree now but that was just the law of the day."
Other students who were less ignorant, more fun to be around, and usually much better students and people read that and be like "could you believe these obvious racists jammed up this innocent woman over a porn mag just to serve a warrant?"
Speaking for myself, I could see that they were out there right now pulling the same type of shit and I thought now they're going to have to go through me, once I get my card, let's fight about it.
Then you start practicing and the lines start to blur a bit, things become grey, and you start to drink your own Kool Aid, whatever that may be. If you go defend corporations, you're going to start thinking maybe they should have more rights, maybe they aren't getting a fair shake by all these whiny plaintiffs and their surviving family members. You go prosecute criminals, you'll think there is danger everywhere, suspicious of everyone.
I found a happy mix of picking and choosing cases of all kinds, now, but spent my formative years representing employees who got hurt at work. My Kool Aid was like "employees are being fucking by corporations, watch them or they'll fuck you too, and insurance companies are evil, life sucking leaches." So, my Kool Aid has no artificial flavor, right?
I did do a lot of extra reading as I was eic of the law review and a top student, able to remember obscure footnotes in great detail; reading stories and then drawing on them to remember rules and policy reasoning is very natural for my memory. Worked out well.
Glad there are lawyers like you out there. I'm curious, what do you think of peoples ability to process & understand information when they are pushing their knowledge limits while LISTENING to content vs actually reading it?
Hey thanks. Glad to be out here. I personally find listening less effective than reading, especially for new material, mainly because with books you get a table of contents and headings, chapter titles, all right there to show you the shape and direction of the material, then you start reading and you have a rough idea of where you are and where you're going. Plus, with a book you can stop, start, flip back, make notes in the margins, highlight. Even if you never look back at the highlights, the act of highlighting means you're reading twice, same for margin notes, or even little pictures.
For studying and review, listening to recorded lectures while writing an outline, including my own reflections and examples, was most effective. Like for the rule that an assault can be a touching of an object intimate to a person, rather than the actual person, the classic case involves slapping a dinner plate out of the plaintiff's hand at a dinner buffet, and the lecturer would usually toss in an example or two, or the reading might have a couple extra in the footnotes, and I would throw those in and add my own like, you could assault someone by slapping the hat off their head, pausing the lecture to create and reflect.
There was a journalist who went to write an article about those memory champions who memorize the order of a deck of playing cards, things such as that, and he asked them how they did it, and then the journalist ended up becoming the champion, because he realized there was nothing special about it: memory is a product of focus and attention. This is the basis of an ancient memorization technique called the memory palace, this and the fact that spatial relationships are naturally easy to remember, even if you just imagine two totally unrelated things having an arbitrary location to one another, just imagining it once will help you remember the two things. Even recall is a product of focus and attention. Like before an exam it's way more effective to clear your head and separate from the subject entirely for fifteen minutes than it is to try and cram a few more items from your notes. Like, you already know the shit, you made the notes, it's in there.
I have this eerie feeling that any large amount of legal documents is going to contain mostly stories of those with means fucking the rest of us.
Me too, actually. Would be some (maybe a lot) work to get set up, but it'd be interesting to run ~all of it through some classifier / analytical models and find out.
I'll give you a couple of caveats. (1) There is such a thing as Mutual Insurance, where the company is owned by its policy holders. Assuming they don't have massive overheads, there is at least an ethical version of insurance that does exist. And (2) C'mon USA, get your fucking act together and do government health insurance. (signed, Canada)
Canada
If we're not careful we're gonna a vote in a scumbag next election whose people want to do away with healthcare access and put it back on "my death panel is my credit limit".
Yes. It is always a battle. Unfortunately the pendulum will likely swing right next election, but hopefully we can limit the damage. Everyone is tired of Trudeau -- combined with a lack of a counterpunching charismatic leader anywhere else means a lot of Canadians will hold their nose and vote PP. Fuck them all. But it's going to happen, sadly.
The Canadian Future Party doesn't have a hope in hell, but they at least have a promising platform. First past the post is bleh.
We have some insurance vendors that are mutual, but when it comes to health, vision, and dental you don't get much of a choice (unless you want to spend even more money and go with a different plan than your work supplies assuming that it's part of your benefits package in the first place).
I speak as a member of the country that indeed needs to get our shit together (like come on, every other country has this figured out).
I've worked in healthcare for over 20 years, and the fact is that licensed, well trained, and caring individuals are forced to waste hours a day getting 'approval' from non-licensed high school educated insurance reps to try and justify their treatments. There can be entire departments dedicated to just dealing with insurance companies at pretty much every hospital, but often times insurance companies will only talk with the actual clinicians that care for patients.
The entire practice is fucked. First of all non-licensed non-medical people should not be dictating the treatment of care. Whether it's directly or by means of denying coverage. Second of all there should be absolutely no way that they should even be allowed to look at your private medical records. And finally when it comes to something like auto insurance there are laws that insurance companies cannot steer customers to certain repair shops or dealerships. And yet when it comes to our health, health insurance companies are able to set up elaborate networks that essentially do the exact same thing they steer customers to certain institutions and prohibit them from going to others.
The entire setup of our health care industry seems like it would be at odds with most of our well-established laws regarding insurance, PHI Access, and delivery of medical care.
This is going to become more and more of a problem since the working conditions are burning out clinicians at alarming rates
I commiserate with my medical professionals literally every time I have to see them. The worst part is that it isn't even the GED holder on the other end of the request. It is the actuarial table and risk analysis software they punch everything in to. Or an AI trained on the exact same tables and algorithms.
I have contemplated training an AI to look at medical records and score the standard of care given to patients. Would be nice to be able to weaponize the tech against them.
Study the stock market but not for too long. It's like staring at Cthulhu.
Watch your back people have disappeared for less.