blueduck

u/blueduck@piefed.social
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Reuters and The Associated Press are news feeds. Strictly “event happened, here are the facts”. They’re intentionally objective and they run the wire services for other publications.

Beyond that, understanding the difference between the news desk and the opinion desk can help you know what’s fact vs. someone’s opinion (not necessarily the publication’s opinion!)

Then look at who is good at what type of reporting. The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg have great US and world business news, and even how the business world is responding to political events… but they’re less wonky than what the Washington post used to be on the details of the political machinations. NYT does good investigative journalism.

independent journalism can be good, but you have to reallY understand the events and broader context to know if they’re right, accurate and correct.

I would also recommend reading many different perspectives to get a full sense of the situation rather than only one publication

Here’s a gift link to the 2019 article.

the early part of the article is about change management. It WOULD be highly disruptive to a large part of the economy:

But doing away with an entire industry would also be profoundly disruptive. The private health insurance business employs at least a half a million people, covers about 250 million Americans, and generates roughly a trillion dollars in revenues. Its companies’ stocks are a staple of the mutual funds that make up millions of Americans’ retirement savings.

Such a change would shake the entire health care system, which makes up a fifth of the United States economy, as hospitals, doctors, nursing homes and pharmaceutical companies would have to adapt to a new set of rules. Most Americans would have a new insurer — the federal government — and many would find the health insurance stocks in their retirement portfolios much less valuable.

But removing the industry that increases costs and extracts rents (to benefit investors and creates worse healthcare outcomes) is kind of the Point…

Many supporters of this approach see elimination of private insurance as a key feature, not a bug, meant to improve the program’s efficiency and equity by streamlining the health care system and weakening profit motives. With a single insurer covering every patient, hospitals and doctors could spend less time and money complying with differing policies, negotiating contracts, and filing forms to get paid.

“It’s worth it,” said Adam Gaffney, the president of Physicians for a National Health Program, which supports single-payer health care and helped design Ms. Jayapal’s bill. “Because we are not going to get to true universal health care without the greater efficiency of a single-payer system.”

I think the commentary is fair throughout the first half of the article… but then there’s some real lack of critical thinking (emphasis added):

Their plans would include nearly every doctor and hospital in the United States and provide generous benefits, including dental care and hearing aids, and would not require patients to pay any out-of-pocket cost to see a doctor. The federal government, of course, would have to cover those benefits, and would need to raise taxes to pay for them.

“Raising taxes” is present as a boogeyman here… taxes bad (they do poll poorly in general) but the key advantage of a single payer system is less bureaucracy (I don’t have n-teams to support doing the same job differently) and more streamlined rules. I don’t have to have more administrators than medical providers in hospital systems. They can focus on care instead of negotiating prices

Gnomon by Nick Harkaway is one of my favorite weird books. On its surface, it’s about a detective digging into a wrongful death at the hands of a state interrogator… but as it progresses, you realize things are not quite what they seem.

It’s a sprawling western. More about the characters and the journey than anything else.

New kid Kalin March “steals” two horses and takes them on a journey through the Utah valley to release them. The owners of the horses are an affluent family who are more interested in power and its trappings than in the actual value of the horses. Kalin’s friend’s sister Landry is from the rival affluent family (they’d been feuding for over a hundred years) and she joins Kalin on the journey.

it’s not the weird meta fictional style novel like House of Leaves, which admittedly I have not read, but it is sprawling with a lot of characters and overlapping perspectives and retrospective comments on the events from years in the future.

Two options for you:

  1. NEOS (New England over shoes). Think of them as waterproof socks over your normal shoes / boots. I’ve worn mine over my leather moccasins house slippers. I’ve had my pair for over a decade in a cold / wet / northern climate and they’re beat up but still waterproof

  2. XTRATUF rubber boots. Particularly if it’s not super cold. I have a pair that go to my knees for working in the mud and muck, but I used them while snow blowing last year and they were dry, grippy and warm

I’m about a quarter of the way through Tom’s Crossing by Mark Z. Danielewski. He’s the guy who did House of Leaves

It’s an updated take on the western genre (I love McMurty, McCarthy and Michener…) set in the 80s. Fantastic writing.

Last week I finished:

  • Biological War by Annie Jacobsen. Not quite as thrilling a start as her Nuclear War but ended in a much more concerning place
  • When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stand. I liked the constrained storytelling conceit. I wish it were longer…
  • Unsouled by Will Wight. I did not really like it… I thought Lindon was a weasel