Seems to be especially bad in Georgia where there’s very poor access to healthcare. More progressive places like NY may have different results I’m not sure. It’s just shocking, no one will even consider helping me

And that’s probably why. Why they wouldn’t just say that, I don’t know. There are lots of places that will do transnasal esophagoscopy throughout the US, so it isn’t a procedure that is just “not done here” or anything, its not as popular in general because its just not as thorough of a procedure.

Here’s the exact wording I got from my Gastro in the USA in a major metro serving millions of people.

I have reached out to our gastroenterology department and have learned that we do not do this procedure. Additionally, we are not aware of anyone in the state of Georgia that offers it.

No one in the ENTIRE state of Georgia… does a Nasal Endoscopy or esophagoscopy, a common procedure all across the world. Truly asinine.

Honestly, I think this is not true, in my experience at least. I think suing doctors was a feature of the '90s and early 2000s, but now people are so poor they can’t afford lawyers to sue a doctor for them, and medical malpractice runs so rampant that doctors don’t even seem to care at all. Everyone has had a bad running with a doctor, yet you’re very unlikely to hear of someone who has sued a doctor and gotten away with it.

I know the sedation is not medically necessary, lots of places outside the USA don’t do it at all. Japan, Europe, etc. There’s research studies that even show non sedated procedures are being used and have been favorably received. Every single doctor I’ve asked about them, they outright refuse to do it without sedation or anesthesia. Guess how much that costs? Thousands of dollars, with insurance. So I have to pay about $5,000 at least out of pocket a year for insurance, then I have to pay $3,500 for this procedure, and the last two that I’ve gotten, they haven’t shown anything. So naturally I’m like okay, can we do a less invasive one without sedation, like they do in other countries? Absolutely not. We won’t do that, and we don’t know anyone else who will ever do it. Like what the hell is this?

I’d estimate as much as 50% of the entire community left on Reddit are bots. I’ve seen people being downvoted systemically, just for saying completely ordinary things that aren’t even controversial.

This is a great explanation for why business deductions are stupid in the first place. Why does being profitable justify being even more profitable by paying fewer taxes?

Winner takes all, I guess? Amazon has been so successful they became a literal monopoly (don’t care to argue semantics of it, this is my opinion), and employs hundreds of thousands of people. They’re so successful that the impact of causing them to pay their fair share might impact the economy in a larger sense. So they just let them have way more freedoms than small businesses?

Seems like it’s completely subjective, too. I’ve seen many posts on reddit about people being shafted by the IRS and forced to pay back a ton in taxes even though it was a legit effort to run an actual business, simply because they don’t “think” it’s a business

All of these are really important policy changes that have positively impacted our society. How do you spark change to the effect of all these? I recently reached out to the Federal trade commission on one company that has some extremely predatory practices but don’t think that’ll do anything. What other methods can I use? Email congressman or something?

I spoke to a lawyer about something similar to this recently and he basically just laughed at me. Told me there is no way it’s worth it, would cost tens of thousands of dollars to fight it in court and would basically have no gain to me personally at all. Overturning such a small amount no matter how wrong or immoral it is would be extremely costly on both sides but they have way more money to throw at the issue than I do which I totally agree with honestly. So you can do something that’s totally immoral, just as long as you have tons of money behind you to pay for it

What you’re saying is just silly. “keep learning” there’s a point or ceiling where people can’t rise any higher or have hit their limit. AI doesn’t have this. You can download hundreds or thousands of pages of content, millions of files, and make it 2.5x smarter than you. They trained AI to take the bar exam and pass it. That has happened. I can’t just keep infinitely learning forever and advancing my career. There’s a point where you hit a ceiling and can’t go any higher.

all I can guarantee is the displacement it will cause won’t be to our benefit and will hurt us more than it will help

It already seems to be causing quite a great deal of harm to our society at least here in the USA. We are seeing tens upon tens of thousands of people being laid off and entire tech companies saying that they are eliminating as many jobs as possible in favor of AI. Makes me wonder what these people who are displaced are doing, because if there are so many people in the job market in such a small specialized industry, it would seem logical that they can’t find anything and they have to go to a new industry

A very obvious solution to groupthink is to do away with the silly voting system. I don’t know why they kept it. A very simple solution would have been to just assign votes to a topic based on how much attention it’s getting. In simple terms, If opposed has 10,000 people that have viewed it, 1,000 people have left a comment, compared to a post that has 100,000 views and 15 comments, you can tell which one should have more attention score. The upvote and downvote system is too easily used as a dislike or like system. Many of us have the maturity to upvote something because we think it’s a good discussion point even if we don’t agree with what the person is saying. But a lot of people don’t think that way mentally. They see something, they read it, immediately go into toxic hater mode and just downvote it for no reason

Can you explain why? Not sure I follow

I agree that votes don’t matter at all. Now please, except my humbly casted vote for you in the upward direction :D But no, I think psychologically speaking, votes actually do kind of matter because of mob mentality. If the first thing you see is something overwhelmingly negative, you’re more likely to think negatively. This was tested and seems to be the case, if people see a bunch of negative comments on something, they are more like to join in on the mob and downvote or be negative