That’s one of Peter Watt’s Rifters trilogy, I think maybe the second one? Been a few years since I read them. I think it’s a biological neural net, not an Ai per se. Lots of big ideas in those books, but not a lot of optimism and some rough stuff.
I wonder if part of this has to do with the more complex, piecemeal nature of medical debt and these buybacks.
How I understand several of these groups (I'm not certain of the one in the article) do these debt purchases is that they purchase debt that has already been bundled together and resold. So when a person owes medical debt to a hospital, a doctor, a surgeon's practice, a pharmacy, etc, they may owe 15k in total, and these buybacks only cover one resold debt, they may have their hospital debt forgiven, for example, but still own 10k in total to the 3 or 4 other creditors.
Contrast that to a mortgage debt, for example, where paying off the mortgage relieves all anxiety around that debt, and I can see how the difference in complex, multi-creditor debt versus simpler, singular-creditor debt could help address the findings of this study.
Paying off your mortgage virtually eliminates your chances of ending up homeless, and absolutely drastically reduces those odds in the near term. This is at the foundational layer of Maslov's hierarchy of needs. I'd expect the impact on one's daily sense of well being to be massive.
Paying off your medical debt might improve your credit score over a long period of time, assuming you have other things going for you in that area. People who are worried about becoming homeless generally do not give a single shit about their credit scores. Having good credit one day is an aspirational thing for probably the majority of humans, closer to the 'optional' upper layer of Maslov's model.
I like how a foundational layer of maslov's hierarchy of needs is just something we shrug off as unattainable to many, but god forbid we discourage people from chasing profits at the expense of all else
When we both worked at an NGO in a mountainous desert country in a relatively peaceful period.
My advice is always, find the kind of thing that you want to be doing and then do it. In my case it was do something more meaningful with my life, in my now wife's case it was walk with the people in the country we were in. Our overall life aims were relatively close, and so one thing led to another.
I'm a Protestant, but that explanation of transubstantiation may be the popular understanding but is not the actual official doctrine of the Catholic Church. I'm not versed enough to explain it except by way of terrible analogy to software development - everyone knows what Agile is, but no one really knows what Agile is, and once you start to read the Agile Manifesto and think deeply, you realize that.
The Catholic Church (and the bible they started from) effectively say everything and its opposite, depending on which argument is convenient at any particular time. They've been debating (and training to debate) these subjects for more than a thousand years. The only official doctrine, in practice, is that they are Right at all times, no matter what the topic might be.
I wouldn't really characterize the Catholic Church's official doctrines that way or that flexibly, but again, I am a Protestant with a number of overall disagreements with them and less personal experience with them, and it is easy for me to read your post as someone with much more personal experience. And since HN isn't really the best place for extended religious discussions, if you are interested for any reason, my email is always open.
... “transubstantiation” refers to a change in which the substance of a thing—what it really is—changes, while its physical characteristics do not. Of course, this sort of change only occurs in the Eucharist, which, though it appears to remain bread and wine throughout the Mass, nevertheless truly becomes the flesh and blood of Jesus.
I took your using the word literally to mean you were saying that the physical characteristics changed, which is apparently not what you were saying.
I think this is a difference in language expectations, because when and where I grew up, some Protestants thought that Catholics believed either that the physical characteristics of the Eucharist changed during the blessing or consumption of the Eucharist, which your link seems to demonstrate to me that you are not agreeing with.
I'm a Protestant, but that explanation of transubstantiation may be the popular understanding but is not the actual official doctrine of the Catholic Church.
I was raised a Catholic, I believe doctrine changed at some time, maybe Vatican II? I remember being told as a child (a long time ago :) not to eat some time before communion.
Hard for me not to conclude that hoarding can happen more easily now, and that it is more prevalent because it takes a surplus of money and a surplus of goods available, plus some relatively remarkable social and political stability (that the U.S. has had since the 1870s...) Other times and places haven't had the critical combination of lots of available goods plus so many people with enough money and space to store it. Go look at stories of hoarders from the 1800s, they are all very wealthy (even for the time) people.
Now, with mass production and vastly increased purchasing power, this is what we see in America. You cannot tell me that a mental health issue in places like Yemen, Syria, or Guatemala can manifest itself in the same way, because people do not have the money, available goods, or social stability for this disorder to become widespread.
This doesn't feel like an archive to me, it feels usable.
When I was 16, my parents got a new answering machine. My dad's recording of the message was yelling into the machine "You have reached xxx-xxx-xxxx. Leave a message" It was aggressive. I re-recorded saying, not yelling, "You have reached xxx-xxx-xxxx. We don't sign autographs, but you can leave us a message." He did not like that I re-recorded it. His father, however, loved it for some reason. (never could figure out what Grandpa found funny.)
20+ years later, when my sister got them a new answering machine (yes, you can still get new ones, my parents still have their landline), the message has now changed to "... we don't sign autographs or send texts, but you can leave us a message."
We also buy my dad VHS auto-rewinders whenever we see them at thrift stores.
Not celebrities, but a little bit of whimsy makes life fun!
As far as rewinders, he has a huge collection of VHS cassettes and VHS decks, but they are all getting old, have already had a long usage when they get to him, and VHS is not a precise medium so not great condition in many cases. The part that usually fails is the motor, and so you have the rewinder to save the motor on the VHS deck. However, the rewinders are also usually low quality and old, and so what happens a lot is that the latches that hold them closed while the rewind fail because they were not great quality plastic (either in composition or design accuracy) that have been subjected to a lot of rattle during their lifetimes and then they break, and it is cheaper/more convenient/fairly environmentally friendly to buy them from thrift stores for ~$3 than to order a ‘new’ $20 one from Amazon/eBay.
Now, this of course leads to a lot more lines of questioning, but I think the answer of ‘because they don’t sign autographs’ is probably sufficient especially since this answer amuses me and is likely to be unseen.
