What do museums, aquariums, botanical gardens, etc. get out of offering free admission to those with EBT cards?

by philg

More than four years, I began noting on this blog that Americans in means-tested everything (not “on welfare” since that is hateful language) were getting into a wide variety of expensive “nonprofit” tourist attractions either for free or at a 90 percent discount. See, for example Why you want to be on SNAP/EBT (2022) for examples sampled near Filthadelphia in which the working-class and middle-class taxpayers got soaked for $25/adult and those on EBT paid either $2 or $0. Practical advice from 2024: How to get free museum admissions for life: sign up for food stamps (SNAP/EBT), noting that the cards don’t expire and, therefore, even one month on EBT can be worth tens of thousands of dollars in the long run. The most recent post in this genre was “Black Creativity” celebrated at the Jewish-founded/Jewish-funded Griffin Museum of Science and Industry (August 2026). Maybe the X algorithm knows of my interest in this topic, but lately I’ve been seeing posts on X where others have noticed the same pricing structure. Here’s one with over 11 million views, regarding an aquarium in Monterey, California that charges $65 per taxpayer (“chump”) for a visit (and is lame compared to the aquarium in Lisbon!).

One question that I hadn’t previously considered is “Why do museums and aquariums do this?” The answer can’t be “Because they care about poor Americans.” They don’t make a serious attempt to market the free admissions program and, in fact, often don’t post “free with EBT” signs near their entrances and ticket booths. A Californian enjoying the EBT lifestyle in Oakland probably won’t travel down to Monterey.

What if the answer is that they want to preserve their own fat salaries, which are propped up by direct government grants, tax exemptions stemming from nonprofit status, and tax deductions for donors stemming from nonprofit status (half of the money “given” by a California donor will actually be given by other taxpayers because of the taxes that the donor avoids and that have to be made up with taxes from others, just as a substantial portion of the $100+ billion that Bill Gates is shipping to Africa via his foundation is actually coming from American peasants). What’s potentially at risk? Based on the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Form 990 from 2025, they’re paying a huge slate of individuals $250,000+ per year. Excerpts (add up all of the numbers in each row for annual comp; note that Julie Packard worked only 28 hours per week to earn nearly half a million dollars in one year):

The Form 990 shows that they got $105 million in “contributions and grants”, all of which are either 100% tax dollars or about 50% tax dollars. They earned $26 million in investment income, which means they skipped on paying significant taxes on capital gains and dividends.

If everyone has to pay $65/adult to get in, eventually someone at the IRS might ask “How is this place different from Disney or SeaWorld?” The Ivy League universities faced the same challenge and got around it in kind of the same way. When the cost was $100,000 pre-Biden dollars for four years and that was considered an outrageous ripoff, the schools said “but we give out financial aid to kids from poor families and they’ll pay $0”. This turned out to be a nearly cost-free promise because they didn’t admit students from poor families who, as predicted by The Son Also Rises: economics history with everyday applications, typically lacked the grades and SAT scores required. As their prices and endowments have rise, of course, the Ivy Leagues have had to keep raising the family income threshold (now about $200,000/year) for a free ride, but the idea is that same. They give up a tiny amount of customer revenue in exchange for preserving an enormous quantity of tax dollars.

Related:

  • “Harvard Endowment Soars to $68 Billion After 27 Percent Return” (Crimson): “The returns followed Harvard’s August disclosure of its $2.2 billion stake in SpaceX, which went public in June in the largest initial public offering in history. The position was worth more than all of the endowment’s other reported public holdings combined. … MIT trailed with [a return of] just over 10 percent.”
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Alternative Realities in the New York Times and New York Post

by philg

Yesterday was a day of wonder, according to the New York Post’s front page:

By contrast, the word “Tesla” does not appear on the NYT’s front page as of 10:30 am. Nothing happened that anyone might have watched last night via streaming on X on in person. Elon is mentioned, but only as a pernicious political influence destroying our sacred democracy:

(I do also wonder why anyone is interested in noncitizen voting. An American whose family hasn’t worked in four generations can vote, presumably to increase government spending on the welfare that has enabled the four generations of relaxation. Why does it matter if Kilmar Abrego Garcia (still Maryland’s leading resident, if not exactly “citizen”) can vote for more pupusas and margaritas? When the U.S. was young, a man started work at age 13 and started to vote at age 21. Since there was no welfare state, essentially everyone who voted had worked for at least eight years. Today we have people voting at age 18 who might not enter the workforce or pay taxes until they’re 28+. If they don’t vote for student loan forgiveness then they’re irrational!)

Nonprofit profiteers bleeding taxpayers dry in Minnesota, according to the New York Post, in order to fill the U.S. with humans from one of the world’s most violent and dysfunctional societies (Somalia):

In the NYT, a nonprofit NGO is featured for its valuable work:

Mirjana Spoljaric, the head of the International Committee of the Red Cross. … Spoljaric travels to all sides of active war zones — Gaza, Ukraine, Iran — meeting with the heads of governments and armed groups alike. [where’s her hijab?] … (We spoke before Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced that the government would be live-streaming a public execution — another sign that the old rules and norms are eroding.) Many world leaders “simply don’t care anymore,” she told me. “And this lack of empathy, this lack of anger, is what I find most dangerous at the moment.”

(i.e., Pete Hegseth is far more dangerous and destructive to American interests than anyone in Gaza or Iran.)

The real problem, from the ICRC’s point of view, is not that the Gazans killed civilians across the border into what they call “the Zionist entity” and took, held, and sometimes later killed hostages from Thailand, Eritrea, Israel, the U.S., etc. It is that a

What happened to Gaza and in Gaza to Palestinians and Israelis supersedes every legal, moral and humane standard. There are so many people complicit in what happened there and continues to happen. The worst now is the fact that people are deprived of human dignity. The perception created that if there’s enough food, that’s good enough — for some people it’s good enough to just barely survive in rubble, and for other people it is only good enough if they can return to normalcy and bring their children back to a normal school.

Safe to say that by “There are so many people complicit in what happened there” she doesn’t mean the overwhelming majority of Gazans polled who supported the October 7, 2023 attack and who continue to support the Islamic Resistance Movement (“Hamas”) and Palestinian Islamic Jihad? (And why didn’t this heroic female travel to Cornell where the real genocide happened?)

Let’s turn back to matters purely domestic… In the New York Post, it was a private citizen with a no-doubt-illegal-to-bring-into-the-school gun (which common sense tells us a private citizen shouldn’t have been allowed to own).

In the New York Times, the real heroes are police who investigate after all of the shooting has stopped (The Other Guys whereas the dad featured in the New York Post was either Danson or Highsmith?).

Speaking of Danson and Highsmith, how awesome would it be for a sequel to The Other Guys to feature resurrected Danson and Highsmith pursuing criminals in a rocket-equipped Tesla Roadster? Maybe they would bust into a Cornell fraternity party 2nd floor bedroom window balcony with the car/aircraft?

As long as we’re talking about demure college gals and The Other Guys….

And since we’re talking about “Gator” and the Tesla Roadster, here are some Floridians who are passionate about both:

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Alternative truths for Facebook and X users (#BelieveJaneDoe or be kicked off Facebook)

by philg

Flash back to just before the most glorious day in the 21st century history, i.e., the Election of Dr. and Joe Biden. Facebook disappeared any reference to the New York Post’s article suggesting that a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden had some interesting photos and emails on it. Twitter (now X) simply prevented users from posting the link (https://nypost.com/2020/10/14/email-reveals-how-hunter-biden-introduced-ukrainian-biz-man-to-dad/).:

The blockbuster correspondence — which flies in the face of Joe Biden’s claim that he’s “never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings” — is contained in a massive trove of data recovered from a laptop computer.

NY Post readers and Facebook/Twitter users thus occupied parallel universes, each with its own truths regarding the Biden family.

Facebook seems to be reprising this for the #BelieveJaneDoe era. I’m in a free-for-all discussion group on Facebook. One of the users is a Big Law partner who yet still has time to post maudlin sympathy for cash-seeking survivors such as the person variously known as Jane Doe/Lucy Craig/the Cornell Skank/Jane Hoe/The Cornell Plaintiff/etc. Let’s call her “The Cornell Plaintiff” here for concreteness. In response to one of his outpourings, I posted, without comment, a text message exchange obtained by TMZ and, after passing through their editorial process, published by the New York Post (link). In the exchange, The Cornell Plaintiff says “our body our choice asf”:

Facebook removed this post, along with a variant that highlighted Jane Doe saying that nothing “illegal” had occurred, because it is an example of “coordinating harm and promoting crime” (that allegedly occurred in 2024?):

Maybe this was a mistake by AI? No. Facebook says that a human was involved in the suppression of anything contrary to #BelieveJaneDoe:

I still hate Elon Musk for (1) not making a self-driving minivan, (2) not offering a max-range RWD version of the Y L, and (3) being a lot richer than I am (#SickWithEnvyEveryDay). But I think it is important to recognize that his takeover of X created an entire universe of facts that wouldn’t have otherwise existed. (Of course, Musk didn’t create the New York Post, but without X it would be impossible to see in one place the kinds of things that the New York Post publishes from 1,000+ different sources worldwide.)

The Cornell Plaintiff’s myriad defendants had better hope that at least some people on the jury are X users. Otherwise, The Cornell Plaintiff is going to be the richest person ever to have attended Cornell. The complaint, which contains some seemingly absurd demands, e.g., that her 20-year-old self be considered a minor with respect to the sorority defendant, has already been removed by quite a few web sites, but it seems to survive at least in one link. There are some deep pockets, not least Cornell’s $12 billion (maybe all of that could be transferred to the Plaintiff to compensate her for the genocide that she suffered?).

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What do folks expect from the Tesla Roadster this evening?

by philg

Tonight the people who put down $50,000 for a Tesla Roadster, announced in 2017, will learn what it is they’re buying and, maybe, how much they’re going to pay for it.

Tesla’s big differentiator right now is self-driving. But why is that valuable in a sports car?

Tesla’s latest creation will accelerate faster than a $50,000 used C8 Corvette? So what? A $50,000 C8 Corvette in Launch Control already accelerates at a terrifying rate, 0-60 in 2.9 seconds, for street use. (See Corvette driving school report (Ron Fellows near Las Vegas) for my report on what I did besides hang out with Hunter Biden in Pahrump.)

It will be great on a race track because each wheel can be individually controlled? If that’s a dramatic improvement then we’ll see Tesla Roadster-only racing?

The car was promised at $200,000 in pre-Biden dollars, right? If we assume that every Nvidia employee wants one, does that mean the market-clearing price for a Roadster will be closer to $500,000 post-Biden dollars? The people who paid $250,000 for a “Founders Series” car apparently weren’t guaranteed a car at that price. They can get a refund if they don’t like whatever Tesla now wants to charge them and Tesla has been holding the money all this time. (Gemini says that if they’d bought $250,000 of Nvidia in November 2017 it would be worth about $11 million today. A stupid investor (like me!) who instead bought the S&P 500 would have about $650,000 today, with dividends reinvested. So if Tesla delivers the car as promised and without charging any more money, it will cost the early adopters $650,000 in 2026 dollars.) I’m going to guess that the only Roadster that can be ordered for delivery within 18 months costs $375,000 (“Douche Edition”?) and that Tesla actually does honor the first 1,000 at $250k/$650k/$11 million depending on how one looks at the opportunity cost of the money. There will be talk about a $290,000 version, but it won’t materialize in our lifetimes.

What would it take for me to get excited about this offering? Seating for 7-plus-puppy and sliding doors!

You can see the 2017 prototype in Los Angeles at a minimum cost of $23 per adult:

Gemini says “EBT cardholders receive free general admission to the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles through community promotional offers”, but Grok disagrees and says that those who wisely choose to refrain from work get only 10% off.

How does this compare to the latest gas-powered concept vehicles? Here’s one from Alfa-Romeo with a hood long enough to hold a V-12:

I’m not sure how different the 2017 Tesla looks from the Maserati MC20:

Here’s a Chevrolet C9 Corvette concept, which could almost surely never be sold due to the lack of practicality, e.g., no luggage space. GM won’t let a base Corvette be useless like the Maserati above (5 cu. ft. luggage). It has to have some functional transportation value, though I guess the ZR1 and ZR1X push the limits by eliminating the frunk and leaving owners with a small hot trunk (about 9 cu. ft. vs. 15 on the base C8).

Update: This is what the Tesla Roadster will look like when it finally comes off the assembly line in 2028 (11:59 pm on December 31?):

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Floridians and Texans should never buy a second home in a state with income and/or estate taxes

by philg

I hope that everyone’s National Estate Planning Awareness Month is going well. As the nation’s successful make their way down to Florida for “the season”, a cautionary tale from the Wall Street Journal: “Was His Home Connecticut or Florida? The Difference Is a $13 Million Tax Bill”.

A rich douche spent 5.5 months in Connecticut during his last year on this planet and that generate a huge amount of litigation over whether CT can harvest estate tax (reducing the kids’ inheritance). He could have avoided all of the drama for his executor simply by making his northern home anywhere away from the states of color in the Tax Foundation map below.

The Islamic Republic of Michigan, for example, or Live Free and Die Free in New Hampshire. Even California would have been a far better choice since elites there refuse to live their own principles by imposing an estate tax to reduce income inequality and the “generational wealth” that they decry.

A bit part of the mess seems to be that, like Marjorie Merriweather Post, the builder of Mar-a-Lago, this douche had three regular residences: FL, AZ, and CT. So he wasn’t anchored in Florida for 183 days per year.

It is all increasingly complicated when people can work anywhere and have multiple homes. The fights between states and the wealthy are playing out in an increasing number of residency audits, said Timothy Noonan, a lawyer who leads a tax residency practice at Hodgson Russ in New York City.

The trial court judge homed in on one factor: Anderson typically spent 5½ months a year from May to mid-October in Greenwich, and 3½ months from November through mid-February in Florida. He spent three months from mid-February through early May in Arizona.

The judge concluded that “ultimately, the most persuasive evidence demonstrating Anderson’s domicile is where he chose to spend his most valuable and limited resource: his time.”

The trial court concluded that Anderson’s personal, social and property connections with Connecticut and Florida were generally equal, but that the estate failed to prove by clear and convincing evidence that Connecticut wasn’t his true home.

Here’s the Vero Beach place:

Estate tax is particularly hazardous. My late mother’s college friend was a passionate Democrat who avoided paying any tax to the Democrats of Maskachusetts by spending 183 days per year in her Palm Beach place. I hope that she lives forever, but what if in the last year of her life she falls ill while on a January visit to MA and then ends up staying through December in MA for continuity of medical care? MA wouldn’t have a slam-dunk case to collect estate tax, but they could certainly argue that the deceased had given up FL residence and it was time to collect 16% ahead of the kids, the ACLU, Planned Parenthood, and other beneficiaries.

Here’s an Ohio-based law firm’s web page on National Estate Planning Awareness Month showing a typical high-net-worth Ohio family (and no other client photos):

Google AI: “The median household income for Black or African American households in Ohio is approximately $42,433 to $45,800 per year, according to recent state demographic snapshots and census data. This is lower than the overall state median household income, which sits above $71,000”,

Grok: “Law firm marketing frequently uses multi-racial or Black family stock images for inclusivity branding, aspirational messaging, or to signal that services are open to everyone. It is not an attempt to accurately depict the statistical modal client. This is common across many professional-service websites and does not change the underlying demographics of who actually pays for attorney-drafted plans. In short: the image is marketing aesthetics. The typical paying customer for this service in Ohio remains a higher-wealth, usually White household.”

ChatGPT characterizes the image as “generic stock-photo family”, implying that it was chosen at random. Pressed, the AI admits that the law firm’s likely clients are rich white people. How does the image help market to those douches? “It could help if the firm thinks affluent white clients care about signals beyond “this family looks like me.” Marketing often tries to communicate things such as “modern,” “inclusive,” “welcoming,” or “serves the whole community.” Some wealthy white prospective clients may respond positively to that branding.”

Also from the Wall Street Journal, a couple in Manhattan whose kids’ inheritance will be reduced if they don’t move…

“Kids?” you might ask if you remember anything from your high school biology class.

Martin, 60, and his husband, Andrew Farach-Colton, 63, were living in that tiny Upper West Side apartment in 1999 when they found out they would be the fathers of twins. They wanted more space, but knew they couldn’t get it in Manhattan on their salaries.

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The absurdity of Owners’ Equivalent Rent illustrated by Zillow

by philg

This morning we got another absurd inflation number from the BLS (3.7%/year). As harped on numerous times here, headline inflation is untethered to actual costs in the U.S. partly because of the Owners’ Equivalent Rent scam. There’s a recent beautiful example of this in our own Florida neighborhood (Abacoa, within Jupiter, which is within Palm Beach County).

The house recently sold for $3.1 million and will, I’m sure, cost the new owners another $3.1 million in property tax, maintenance, insurance, landscaping, pool care, etc. over the years. What would an owner tell the BLS about what he or she thinks it would cost to rent? Perhaps the Zillow number of $8,593 per month. That’s about half of what an interest-only 30-year mortgage on the place would cost, if a 30-year interest-only mortgage were available. It might be 20% of the real cost of living in the house as an owner.

Note that this is pretty much the top of the Abacoa market. The owners apparently bought it, invested a ton of money in renovation (though it was not taken back to the studs nor was the room layout changed), and then decided that they were too rich to live in a $3.1 million house.

Here’s the complete price history:

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Did AI stick a fork in 8K televisions?

by philg

The American dream of sitting home all day in means-tested public housing while enjoying streaming programs on a beautiful OLED TV seems to be dying due to our evil AI overlords. Televisions are becoming MORE expensive, not less, because AI is buying all the processors, memory, and fab capacity. (See “TVs are finally being hit hard by the AI-fueled memory crisis: for the first time, the cost of the processors is higher than the display panels in some models”, October 2, 2026.)

Movies are still being made primarily in 2K Digital Intermediate because Hollywood can’t afford the memory and processing power to do editing and effects at 4K. Our brothers and sisters in Japan introduced practical 8K devices about 12 years ago (Wokipedia). I would have expected 8K televisions for desktop monitor use and for living room use by now.

Should we just give up on ever having an 8K television at consumer prices? I know that the theory is we can’t use that much resolution with current sizes and viewing distances, but I don’t believe it. There are a lot of situations where one can walk right up to a TV and inspect detail, e.g., if it is displaying a document. Maybe it isn’t necessary for enjoying a movie mastered in 2K, but there are lots of ways that a big screen can be used other than for watching a movie. Family photo collage, for example. One of our neighbors recently got a 100″ TV at Costco and there is nothing in front of it. If the machine were 8K, he could put an entire vacation’s worth of photos on the screen at once and people could walk up to the TV if interested. (I don’t like how it looks in his house, incidentally, when it isn’t on. It is a truly massive black hole in the wall. If I can take over from Donald Trump as dictator, I will order TV companies to put in all kinds of great features for what the TV can/should do when nobody is watching TV.)

Separately, who has bought a TV roughly 85″ in size lately? We have a low-end 86″ LG that we got for $900 at Costco in 2022. It was a floor model and came with a 5-year warranty. I wanted to see if something that huge was actually what we wanted. Should we splurge on an 83″ OLED? We never watch when the room is brightly lit (sometimes in the afternoon because of passionate NFL fans, but windows can be shaded). Or are the vastly-cheaper LCD TVs nearly as good? One of my big dreams, as noted above, is convenient software for running a slide show when the TV isn’t being used for TV (we might actually watch 10 hours per week).

Gemini on why we could never have a $900 OLED TV this size, even without AI as our enemy (not in quote style):

The reason OLED TVs max out at 83 inches instead of the standard 85 inches comes down to the fascinating—and ruthless—math of how panels are manufactured in factories.

Every OLED TV starts its life as part of a massive, garage-door-sized sheet of glass called “Mother Glass.” Most OLED factories use what is called a “Gen 8.5” size sheet. Manufacturers need to cut this mother glass into TV-sized rectangles with as little wasted glass as possible, much like cutting cookies from rolled-out dough.

Engineers figured out a highly efficient cutting layout (called Multi-Model Glass production) that perfectly fits two 83-inch panels and two 48-inch panels onto a single Gen 8.5 sheet with almost zero waste. If they bumped the size up to 85 inches, the 48-inch panels would no longer fit. They would have to throw away a massive amount of unused, highly expensive mother glass, which would make the 85-inch TVs prohibitively expensive.

Manufacturing an OLED panel requires depositing ultra-thin organic materials with near-perfect precision in a vacuum. It is a highly volatile process. A single microscopic dust particle or moisture drop can ruin an entire panel. If a tiny defect happens on a 55-inch panel, they throw away a 55-inch panel. If it happens on an 83-inch panel, they have to throw away a massive piece of inventory. The cost of all the ruined large panels gets baked directly into the retail price of the ones that survive the factory.

Standard LCD panels are completely commoditized; there are dozens of massive factories in China and Taiwan churning them out, driving prices into the floor. Large-scale OLED TV panels, however, are incredibly difficult to make and are almost exclusively manufactured by just two companies on earth: LG Display and Samsung Display. Without a flood of cheap, third-party competition, there is no pressure to slash prices.

OLEDs will likely always carry a premium simply because the organic technology fundamentally resists the kind of dirt-cheap mass commoditization that makes 85-inch LCDs so affordable today.

CES 2012:

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France is rich in immigrants, but not rich enough to pay its sovereign debt?

by philg

The French, just like us, have been trying to cheat their way to greater wealth/consumption via government borrowing (WSJ):

And, just as with the U.S., investors are beginning to demand to be paid for the possibility of inflation/default.

We were informed that inflation was impossible because of the Eurozone rules regarding deficit spending (no more than 3% of GDP). How has France been able to avoid compliance? ChatGPT:

Another good excuse: coronapanic.

The EU suspended normal fiscal requirements during COVID. From 2020 through 2023, the EU activated its general escape clause, allowing governments considerable flexibility to run deficits in response to the pandemic and subsequent economic disruption.

They made an affirmative decision, in other words, to make the kids whose schools had been closed (nothing like the 18-month closures in Democrat-run U.S. cities, though) pay for it all.

We’re informed that low-skill immigrants make a country rich. France is roughly 25 percent immigrants and children of immigrants. Why isn’t France rich enough that tax revenues can fund current government spending and also pay down some debt?

Finally, with the “French” in the streets (they’re “protesting” according to the New York Times and BBC and “rioting” according to Fox), what rational investor would locate a factory there rather than in Poland, Hungary, or Switzerland? Who reads a “France’s violent protests involve ‘second- or third-generation’ immigrants” headline and decides that the long-term trend is positive?

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Indigenous Peoples’ Day in Maskachusetts

by philg

An excerpt from an “About Me” web page created in the Land of Science (TM):

I currently reside with my family on the ancestral and occupied lands of Nonantum of the Indigenous Massachusett people, whose name was appropriated by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. I commit to being LGBTQIA2S+ affirming and anti-racist in my personal and professional life. My pronouns are she/her/hers.”

Happy Indigenous Peoples’ Day to those who celebrate!

An indigenous LGBTQIA2S+ resident of Maskachusetts would be a shoo-in for a job with elderly progressive Senator Markey (BIPOC = “Black, Indigenous, and People of Color”, remember).

How is it remotely legal/Constitutional under the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection clause to say that a Black Indigenous lesbian would be hired ahead of a white cisgender heterosexual male? (Yes, in theory they hide behind the fig leaf of “encouraged to apply”, like the person whose social media output is 90% criticism of Israel who says “I don’t hate Jews, but only the world’s only Jewish state”, but does anyone believe that when choosing between two candidates with equal qualifications the victimhood categories of BIPOC and LGBTQ+ wouldn’t be used to tip the hiring decision?) And if the elderly progressive white male is so passionate about BIPOC and LGBTQ+ people getting federal paychecks, why doesn’t he resign the position that he earned only through white male privilege and allow the governor (highlighted as lesbian by state-sponsored PBS) to appoint a BIPOC LGBTQ+ replacement?

Speaking of celebration, the heavily regulated Massachusetts health insurance market is apparently a fantastic place to make a profit. From LinkedIn:

After digging through more Medicare Advantage numbers, there’s such blatant corruption that defies not just economic principles, not just healthcare principles, but somehow lets MA insurers make 3 TIMES the gross profit margins when compared to normal private insurance margins.

Using KFF’s analysis of insurer financial filings, I looked at gross margin per enrollee, meaning premium revenue minus the medical claims insurers actually paid out. In 2024, Medicare Advantage insurers kept $1,655 per enrollee. Individual market plans kept $987. Fully insured employer plans kept $846. Medicaid managed care kept $608.

What makes no sense is that, like Medicare Advantage, Medicaid runs through private insurer contracts. 78% of Medicaid beneficiaries, more than 66 million people, are enrolled in private managed care plans, and five publicly traded insurers, Centene, UnitedHealth, Elevance, Molina, and CVS/Aetna, control 47% of that enrollment.

These are the exact same companies that administer MA plans, paid by the same government, yet in the MA program they keep nearly 3x as much per enrollee.

This happens every single year. Between 2018 through 2024, MA gross profit margin was higher than self funded plans, fully insured employer plans, and Medicaid plans.

Just as Arabs became indigenous to any territory that they conquer, I think it is fair to say that these highly profitable health insurers are indigenous to Massachusetts by virtue of having conquered so much profit.

Related:

Gemini, regarding what life was like when the Massachusett ruled Massachusetts:

Public Ritual Torture: Captured enemy male warriors were sometimes subjected to prolonged public torture before execution. This served as a spiritual and emotional outlet for grieving families (a component of the widespread “mourning war” complex) and provided a platform for the captive warrior to demonstrate stoicism and physical courage in the face of death.

Mutilation: Captives or slain enemies were occasionally dismembered or burned, both to neutralize the enemy’s spirit and to serve as a psychological deterrent to rivals.

Taking severed body parts—specifically scalps, heads, or hands—as battle trophies was practiced as proof of victory, honor, and spiritual dominance over an adversary.

Internal Justice System: Internal tribal discipline for severe offenses—such as murder, treason, or theft within the group—was swift and physical. Punishments meted out by the sachem (chief) or council could include beatings, banishment (which was often a slow death sentence given reliance on tribal food networks), or summary execution.

Meanwhile, in Florida, the state DOT encourages a celebration that is both more and less traditional (source):

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Lack of an AI chatbot inside Audible shows that Amazon thinks that running an AI is stupid/unprofitable?

by philg

Amazon is one of the world’s savviest companies and has a sharp eye for what is sustainably profitable. Amazon owns Audible, the audiobook company.

An obvious use case for an AI chatbot is to listen to the listener and be prepared to pause the audiobook and answer questions about the material, about what happened or was said in an earlier chapter, etc. This doesn’t exist inside Audible, however, which leads me to conclude that Amazon has determined that it is impossible to make money by offering an AI chatbot.

(Why can’t the listener use his/her/zir/their phone’s built-in AI services to interrupt Audible and answer questions? Whatever chatbot is behind the phone’s Siri or similar isn’t necessarily preloaded with the complete contents of whatever book the phone owner is listening to, doesn’t immediately have access to context such as what sentence was most recently played, etc. So it would take a lot of permissions and extra programming for the phone to answer “Where is that?” after a place name was mentioned in the book.)

If we assume that Amazon is the smart money, does that mean OpenAI, Anthropic, XAI, Meta, and their respective investors are the dumb money?

Speaking of Meta, who has tried their Muse AI app on a phone? A friend in San Francisco told me to try it. Initial results haven’t been promising. It asked for access to Gmail and Google Calendar and then, when asked about important events in the upcoming week, completely failed to understand that some events on my calendar are almost sure to be handled by other family members, e.g., a dental appointment for another adult member of the household that was added to the shared calendar by said adult member.

Wall Street Journal:

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