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The Brief, Baffling Life of an Accidental New York Neighborhood

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The Brief, Baffling Life of an Accidental New York Neighborhood

But how did this defunct train station end up looking like a neighborhood on Google Maps? Sisson got lucky in his search—one site specified a Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) number for Haberman, part of a system used by the U.S. Geological Survey. The USGS maps had spaced neighborhood and train station names differently so they could be distinguished from one another, but somewhere along the line there had been some confusion, and Haberman was clearly listed as a populated place. Sisson speculates that a USGS employee made the simple mistake when the old maps were being digitized, and then those data got a second life then they were picked up by Google Maps’ algorithms.
Map: Gilman Lake

You don’t own your own life, the state does 🤔

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You don’t own your own life, the state does 🤔

It is a widely understood concept that all wildlife is in the public trust, that you don’t own the wildlife even on your own land. The state owns all wildlife, they set limits on when and how much you can take. In British commonwealth counties like Canada they say all wildlife belongs to the Queen but in America, we say it’s owned by government.

It turns out that all human life also falls under the public trust doctrine. Human life belongs to the state, as only the state can own it and destroy it. Slavery is a right reserved to the government by the constitution. The government has the sole power to judge what chemicals you can ingest, whether or not to end your life or that of others, what kind of sexual acts and even abortions are lawful in the privacy of your own home or doctors office.

Why Hospitals and Health Insurers Didn’t Want You to See Their Prices – The New York Times

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Why Hospitals and Health Insurers Didn’t Want You to See Their Prices – The New York Times

This year, the federal government ordered hospitals to begin publishing a prized secret: a complete list of the prices they negotiate with private insurers.

The insurers’ trade association had called the rule unconstitutional and said it would “undermine competitive negotiations.” Four hospital associations jointly sued the government to block it, and appealed when they lost.

They lost again, and seven months later, many hospitals are simply ignoring the requirement and posting nothing.

But data from the hospitals that have complied hints at why the powerful industries wanted this information to remain hidden.

It shows hospitals are charging patients wildly different amounts for the same basic services: procedures as simple as an X-ray or a pregnancy test.

And it provides numerous examples of major health insurers — some of the world’s largest companies, with billions in annual profits — negotiating surprisingly unfavorable rates for their customers. In many cases, insured patients are getting prices that are higher than they would if they pretended to have no coverage at all.