skybrian's recent activity
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Comment on Single, solo, poor, woman gets $500k pre-tax, how to make the most of it? in ~finance
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Comment on Single, solo, poor, woman gets $500k pre-tax, how to make the most of it? in ~finance
skybrian Link ParentIt sounds like you're already on top of things as far as being frugal and the thing to work on is getting some kind of income. You now have money you could tap into, and this might include moving...It sounds like you're already on top of things as far as being frugal and the thing to work on is getting some kind of income. You now have money you could tap into, and this might include moving expenses if there's better opportunity somewhere else, but it needs to be a move that will very likely pay off.
Also, not sure if you're being metaphorical about leaving the house once a month, but there are reasons to get out regularly that don't involve buying things, like exercise.
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Comment on Single, solo, poor, woman gets $500k pre-tax, how to make the most of it? in ~finance
skybrian LinkI don't know much about them, but from some quick web searches, for an inherited IRA, apparently people are usually required to withdraw the money in 10 years, but there are exceptions and you'll...I don't know much about them, but from some quick web searches, for an inherited IRA, apparently people are usually required to withdraw the money in 10 years, but there are exceptions and you'll want to figure out if you qualify for them. Also, you'll need to figure out the rules for taxation of withdrawals. That's going to require someone to look at the specifics of your situation to figure out.
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Comment on How US doctors cashed in on the No Surprises Act in ~health
skybrian Link ParentI consider that to be doctors taking money from the "little guy" and the system not being sufficiently well-designed to prevent them from doing it.I consider that to be doctors taking money from the "little guy" and the system not being sufficiently well-designed to prevent them from doing it.
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Comment on How US doctors cashed in on the No Surprises Act in ~health
skybrian (edited )Link ParentNot sure what you mean. Are these doctors who take advantage of the system the "little guy?"Not sure what you mean. Are these doctors who take advantage of the system the "little guy?"
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Comment on How US doctors cashed in on the No Surprises Act in ~health
skybrian Link ParentThere ought to be better procedures for more quickly adjusting new laws after they see how people game them. Maybe this tactic should have been anticipated, but not every new tactic will be.There ought to be better procedures for more quickly adjusting new laws after they see how people game them. Maybe this tactic should have been anticipated, but not every new tactic will be.
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Comment on Why America is so much better than Europe at immigration in ~society
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...] [...] [...] [...]From the article:
By virtually every metric that matters — employment, crime, fiscal contribution, second-generation mobility — immigration is working dramatically better here than across the Atlantic. Understanding the differences between U.S. immigration and European immigration is indeed a very good idea if you want to design better, smarter U.S. immigration policy — but that’s going to look like “not making Europe’s mistakes” much more than adopting Europe’s solutions.
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The most important reason why immigration is more successful in the United States is the simplest: Europe makes it structurally much harder for immigrants to work.
Rigid employment protection, sector-wide collective bargaining, and high effective minimum wages create insider-outsider dynamics that hit newcomers hardest.
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Most European countries ban asylum seekers from working for six to nine months after filing their claims, often longer in practice. The intent is often explained as discouraging people who are entering for economic reasons from making spurious asylum claims. But about 1 million applications for asylum are filed each year despite this discouragement, and most of those people then become dependents of the state — or participate in the illegal economy — at least for the first while.
What employment bans actually produce is lasting economic scarring: People lose skills, lose contact with employers, and get pushed into informal work or dependency. The negative employment effects persist up to a decade after arrival. And by design, the bans feed the very dynamic of immigrants as a fiscal burden that fuels public backlash.
The United States, for all its dysfunction, lets most immigrants start working almost immediately. And the results are dramatic. The U.S. is a global outlier: refugee employment rates are comparable to those of economic immigrants from arrival. In Europe, it takes refugees a decade or two to narrow that gap.
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In the U.K., asylum seekers banned from working increased property crime; EU workers with labor market access did not. Using Italian legalization as a regression discontinuity, Paolo Pinotti estimated that granting legal work status reduced immigrant crime by roughly 50%.
The United States also bars asylum seekers from working for 180 days. So why does it still outperform? Because until recently, most humanitarian immigrants to the U.S. were resettled refugees who received work authorization on arrival, not asylum seekers subject to the waiting period.
When the recent southern border surge changed that, the results looked more European.
In reaction, New York City spent billions housing people barred from earning a living. This is the closest the U.S. has come to running the European experiment on its own soil, and it produced exactly the outcomes Leonhardt attributed to immigration itself rather than to the policy regime surrounding it.
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Sweden is the instructive failure case.
No country in Europe has invested more in integration services, language classes, and social support. Yet Swedish integration outcomes have been among the worst in the OECD. The lesson is that integration effort does not equal integration design.
You cannot integrate people into a labor market that will not hire them, and spending generously on language courses while maintaining employment bans and rigid hiring practices is the policy equivalent of teaching someone to swim and then barring them from the pool.
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Why America is so much better than Europe at immigration
11 votes -
Comment on Synthesizing multi-agent harnesses for vulnerability discovery in ~comp
skybrian LinkFrom the abstract: Apparently, if you have the right harness, you can find security bugs with a Chinese LLM. Source code here. The prompt that their system automatically generated is here.From the abstract:
[...] We evaluate AgentFlow on TerminalBench-2 with Claude Opus 4.6 and on Google Chrome with Kimi K2.5. AgentFlow reaches 84.3% on TerminalBench-2, the highest score in the public leaderboard snapshot we evaluate against, and discovers ten previously unknown zero-day vulnerabilities in Google Chrome, including two Critical sandbox-escape vulnerabilities (CVE-2026-5280 and CVE-2026-6297).
Apparently, if you have the right harness, you can find security bugs with a Chinese LLM. Source code here.
The prompt that their system automatically generated is here.
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Synthesizing multi-agent harnesses for vulnerability discovery
9 votes -
Comment on China calls for ‘concerted’ efforts to tackle excess solar production in ~enviro
skybrian Link ParentPerhaps the Chinese government is worried about what happens when the bubble bursts and a lot of investments and loans go bad?Perhaps the Chinese government is worried about what happens when the bubble bursts and a lot of investments and loans go bad?
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Comment on How US doctors cashed in on the No Surprises Act in ~health
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...]From the article:
Dr. Rowe has taken full advantage of a new arbitration system, part of a major consumer protection law Congress passed in 2020 with bipartisan majorities. The No Surprises Act was designed to eliminate surprise medical bills, for patients who showed up in the emergency room and were treated by a doctor who didn’t take their insurance.
It bars those out-of-network doctors from billing patients directly. Instead, they can plead their case to a government-approved arbitrator. If they win, the patient’s insurer has to pay their desired amount.
By all accounts, the law is successfully protecting patients against bills from doctors they never chose. But it has also generated an expensive unanticipated consequence: Doctors have flooded the arbitration system with millions of claims. Most are winning, often collecting fees hundreds of times higher than what they could negotiate with insurers directly or what they could have earned from patients before the law passed.
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Some health plans said they have increased premiums this year to cover the extra costs. The United Service Workers health plan, which covers 20,000 trades workers in the New York area, said it boosted premiums by an extra 1.75 percentage points to offset arbitration awards and fees. The system has also enriched a new class of specialized businesses, which assist doctors in navigating the bureaucratic process.
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When the law passed, government officials estimated that about 17,000 cases would go to arbitration a year. Instead, doctors brought 1.2 million such cases in the first half of last year, and won around 88 percent of them.
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The arbitrators are doing well too. The fees they earn for deciding cases, which range from $425 to $1,150 per case, have added up. They earned $885 million from 2022 to 2024.
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In arbitration, doctors and insurers each propose a price for the care, along with arguments for why it is appropriate. An arbitrator must pick one of the two numbers, and there is no opportunity to appeal the decision.
Arbitrators have repeatedly approved doctors’ submissions of extremely high prices for common medical procedures, according to court filings and a New York Times analysis of a large public data set with basic information on each dispute.
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Many claims that shouldn’t be eligible for arbitration, such as those for patients covered through the government programs Medicare and Medicaid, move through the system anyway. The claim from the New Jersey anesthesiologist involved a patient on a UnitedHealthcare Medicare Advantage plan, according to a lawsuit that UnitedHealth has filed protesting the arbitration decision.
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Medical specialties like spinal and plastic surgery, for which surprise bills were rare before the law, now frequently have cases in arbitration, according to the public data. Some practices are using the law to obtain high payments for routine medical care, including gynecologists who have won fees 600 times higher than usual rates for placing intrauterine contraceptive devices, or I.U.D.s.
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Health policy experts have been surprised to see such lopsided results that favor doctors. Some argue that because the arbitrators are paid per case, they may have an incentive to render decisions that keep doctors coming back.
Arbitrators may also, like the broader public, prefer doctors to insurers, said Matthew Fiedler, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who has studied the law. “Arbitrators are people, and the typical person likes physicians.”
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How US doctors cashed in on the No Surprises Act
19 votes -
Comment on Astronomers find the edge of the Milky Way in ~space
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...] [...]From the article:
Disk galaxies like the Milky Way form stars “inside-out” — starting from the center and working outwards through the disk. So, as a general rule, the farther out astronomers look, the younger the stars are.
Now, a team led by Karl Fiteni (then at University of Malta), carried out under the supervision of Joseph Caruana and Victor Debattista, has analyzed more than 100,000 giant stars. By coupling observations with advanced computer simulations, the astronomers show that this inside-out pattern reverses at between 35,000 and 40,000 light-years from the Milky Way’s center. Beyond this distance, the stars are older again.
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The analysis involves data from the LAMOST and APOGEE spectroscopic surveys, as well as measurements from the European Space Agency’s Gaia satellite. Fiteni’s team focused on red giant branch stars, whose ages can be estimated with relatively high precision. The results are published in Astronomy & Astrophysics.
The stars beyond this boundary probably weren’t formed in situ. But they didn’t come from infalling satellite galaxies either. Instead, they likely migrated outward over time. “A key point about the stars in the outer disk is that they are on close-to-circular orbits, meaning that they had to have formed in the disk,” says team member Victor Debattista (University of Lancashire, UK).
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Similar U-shaped age profiles have been seen in simulated disk galaxies and inferred in observations of other galaxies beyond our own. So the Milky Way is not unusual but merely following a common pattern of disk evolution, with the newly identified boundary marking a transition that may be a generic feature of spiral galaxies.
It is currently unclear what stymies star formation beyond this boundary. It is possible that the gravity of the Milky Way’s central bar corrals gas at preferred radii. Or it could be due to the bend of the galaxy, which warps towards the edge, disrupting star formation in the outer reaches.
New and future instruments could help paint a clearer picture. They include the 4MOST spectroscopic instrument at the European Southern Observatory in Chile, which saw first light last October, and the WEAVE spectrograph, attached to the William Herschel Telescope at La Palma in the Canary Islands.
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Astronomers find the edge of the Milky Way
22 votes -
Comment on China calls for ‘concerted’ efforts to tackle excess solar production in ~enviro
skybrian Link ParentIt seems like solar panel prices have always been "artificial" due to various subsidies and tariffs? It's unclear what a "natural" price would be. It's also always been a very difficult industry...It seems like solar panel prices have always been "artificial" due to various subsidies and tariffs? It's unclear what a "natural" price would be.
It's also always been a very difficult industry to make money in. This move will probably make it a little easier for manufacturers everywhere, if it works.
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Comment on For $700 a month, sleeping pods make San Francisco more affordable, but at what cost in ~life
skybrian (edited )Link ParentIt doesn't seem like median income and the poverty rate (which is about people at the bottom) have much to do with each other? They're about different people. According to this chart, California...It doesn't seem like median income and the poverty rate (which is about people at the bottom) have much to do with each other? They're about different people.
According to this chart, California median household income reached $100,000 per year in 2024. And that means half the households in the state make more than that.
Housing prices are high in part because there are a lot of people out there who can pay that much, and they're competing for housing.
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Comment on China calls for ‘concerted’ efforts to tackle excess solar production in ~enviro
skybrian Link ParentMy understanding is that the solar modules themselves are now a relatively small part of the total cost of installation, so moderate price changes might not have that much of an effect, other than...My understanding is that the solar modules themselves are now a relatively small part of the total cost of installation, so moderate price changes might not have that much of an effect, other than on the manufacturers' finances.
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Comment on Donald Trump officials reclassify medical marijuana as Schedule III drug in ~society
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...] [...]From the article:
The Justice Department said that it was immediately reclassifying marijuana products that had been approved by the Food and Drug Administration as lower-risk drugs and establishing a new registration process for state medical marijuana licenses. Acting attorney general Todd Blanche also said that the administration would hold a new hearing to “fully” reschedule marijuana under the Controlled Substances Act.
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Marijuana has long had the same Schedule I classification as heroin, but administration officials have sought to reclassify the drug as Schedule III, similar to some common prescription painkillers. Medical marijuana is now reclassified as Schedule III under the Justice Department’s order, which does not decriminalize marijuana for recreational use.
Some health care advocates have spent years pressing for more access to marijuana as a potential treatment, warning that restrictions on the drug made it too hard to conduct research. The administration’s moves also bring national policy closer to legitimizing state laws that have authorized medical marijuana businesses, after years of stalemates over whether states should be in compliance with federal law.
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President Joe Biden’s Justice Department in 2024 formally recommended that marijuana be reclassified as Schedule III, but the move stalled amid legal disputes and a pending Drug Enforcement Administration hearing.
Drug policy experts said that federal agencies such as the Department of Health and Human Services were required to undertake reviews related to public health and safety, even if the pace of that work agitated Trump.
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Donald Trump officials reclassify medical marijuana as Schedule III drug
32 votes
Seems to me that you are being overly defensive and not letting the OP speak for themselves, and decide for themselves if my tentative advice makes any sense for them? I was hardly making a hard sell.