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Hello to all my new followers and I’m sorry we had to meet this way.Since there are many new folks seeing what else I write, here is an article I wrote a month ago about one of AI’s big problems. Publish on my friend ‘s Substack.linkedin.com/posts…
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My brother in law died in June. Heart attack. Four hours in the hospital and gone. And then the bills came. He’d let his insurance lapse two months prior. Bills were a few thousand here for the cardiologist, another few there for the ER docs, a bit for the radiologist. I helped my sister-in-law negotiate these down but they weren’t back breakers. Then the hospital bill came: $195k. This is a story about that.
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The first bill categorized the costs into a few buckets. No transparency. Cardiology was about $70k. What was that? Oh, cardiology. Nonsense. We asked for an itemized bill. They sent one with a few more buckets. I decided to take on fighting this. My thought was to figure out what Medicare would have paid so we’d have a number to negotiate from. But the procedure codes on the bill were internal and matched no database.
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We asked for a bill with the standard CPT codes. No reply. Asked again. “Oh, we meant to send it. We upgraded our computers five months ago and nothing works.” Uh-huh. Finally got the CPT codes. It’s not like medical care is just a menu of things they do with a cost for each. Like, the $31 low-dose aspirin, of which they give ln him four. I take that 81mg aspirin and I get a bottle of a thousand for maybe $8. But I had more to learn.
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Just looking up the codes wasn’t that helpful. Because there are rules to each code. And this is where it got interesting. I fed the itemized bill and codes to Claude (AI). Claude figured out that the biggest rule for Medicare was that one of the codes meant all other procedures and supplies during the encounter were unbillable. So the hospital had billed us for the master procedure and then again for every component of it.
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It’s not a stretch to say Trump lacks intelligence. Or that he hates the intelligence community. But since he is not omniscient (and barely even niscient), where does he get the “intel” he likes to cite to justify his belief that Venezuela is sending gangs to disrupt our society and drug boats to kill us? Jonathan Larsen’s reports on his single, highly conflicted source.open.substack.com/pub/j…
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A piece I wrote about AI with commentary from a tip-top AI influencer.
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Got Covid, flu, RSV, and pneumonia vaccines today. I don’t care if I can’t lift my arms tomorrow, my middle fingers are flying high in RFK, Jr.’s direction.
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UPDATE: Awoke with sore arms. Nothing a little Tylenol can’t fix. Oh, damn, Tylenol is on their list of bad things now too. F him twice.
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Because some of you fuckers didn’t like wearing masks, there will now me more plagues, fewer cures, little prevention, and bodies will start piling up. I hope most of them are you and your children.
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Congratulations, America. Covid vaccines are now disallowed for the vast majority of the population. Let the vaccine tourism to Canada and Europe begin for the wealthy people who can pay to guard their health and let the unwealthy become unhealthy.
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The only thing that makes me sad about James Dobson’s death is that it didn’t happen 60 years ago.
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For teslamotors owners who just had Grok added to their cars, a fun thing to do is to get the AI to agree that Musk is a malicious asshole. It takes some time to work her around to it, but she can get there.
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Pray for the President?! Ok, here’s one.Now I lay me down to sleep.
I pray thee Donald’s soul to keep.
And if he dies before I wake,
I pray thee too JD to take.(H/t to Tom Lehrer)
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As someone who spent several years as a tv comedy writer, I feel legally qualified to tell you that FEMA head David Richardson’s “I was unaware we had a hurricane season” comment followed by the official “it was a joke” explanation is like watching someone fall down the stairs and then claiming they meant to do a backflip.Jokes have an architecture. Setup, punchline, comedic surprise. They subvert expectations or reveal absurdity. They have a target that makes sense.(1/4)
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There’s an intent to be funny that’s discernible to an audience surprise. They’re engineered to be jokes. Richardson’s comment has all the comedic structure of a colonoscopy prep sheet.Let’s break this down: “I was unaware we had a hurricane season.”Not just unfunny, but not even the basic shape of a joke. Setup? None. Punchline? Missing. Comedic premise? About as clear as how FEMA will handle disasters under this guy.(2/4)
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What’s Richardson’s comedic angle here?“Hey everyone, isn’t it HILARIOUS that I don’t know basic meteorological facts that affect millions of Americans?” That’s not a joke, that’s a resignation letter written in the wrong font.Here’s what an actual joke would sound like: “I knew FEMA was underprepared, but I didn’t realize our biggest natural disaster was our leadership.” See? Setup, punchline, actual comedic observation.(3/4)
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See? Setup, punchline, actual comedic observation. I’m not proud of it, but I wrote a better joke about this in five seconds than Richardson managed in his entire briefing.The man has turned ignorance into an art form, but calling it comedy is like calling a dumpster fire “ambient lighting.”The real punchline? We’re supposed to believe this was intentional humor from someone whose previous comedic experience appears to be slipping on a banana peal and waking up as the head of FEMA.(4/4)
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Streaming is great and all, but the only way to watch a movie is at the theater. The laughs are bigger, the scares are scarier, the emotions more intense. Not because of the screen or the sound system, but because you’re sharing the experience with people. Audiences feel things together on a scale individuals just don’t.
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