Humanity

Expanded Medicaid and Missouri 🏥

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Expanded Medicaid and Missouri 🏥

Accidents happen, people have healthcare needs – it’s not just the colored folks in the cities either. You can be the model homesteader or off-grider in rural Missouri and have an accident with a chain saw, get kicked by cow or trampled by a hog. Farm life is dangerous.

We want to believe that everybody who works can get affordable health care but that isn’t the case. The Medicaid expansion allows millions of people to buy into low cost, basic health insurance that would otherwise be unaffordable. The federal government picks up most of the tab, and while it’s a cost to state budgets it helps a lot of people, not just those who live in the big cities.

Maybe I have a dog in the fight. I’m not a resident of Missouri but it’s on the short list of states I’ve been interested in some day moving to in the future. Knowing that affordable health care options for those of modest incomes are available is important to me. I don’t like doctors but sometimes you need them.

Why Do Smart People Do Foolish Things?

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Why Do Smart People Do Foolish Things?

We all probably know someone who is intelligent but does surprisingly stupid things. My family delights in pointing out times when I (a professor) make really dumb mistakes. What does it mean to be smart or intelligent? Our everyday use of the term is meant to describe someone who is knowledgeable and makes wise decisions, but this definition is at odds with how intelligence is traditionally measured. The most widely known measure of intelligence is the intelligence quotient, more commonly known as the IQ test, which includes visuospatial puzzles, math problems, pattern recognition, vocabulary questions and visual searches.

With Guests Daniel Kahneman, James Hutchinson & G.M. Pucilowski

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Judge the Judges: With Guests Daniel Kahneman, James Hutchinson & G.M. Pucilowski

5/24/21 by James Hutchinson, Katy Milkman, Daniel Kahneman, G.M. “Pooch” Pucilowski

Web player: https://podcastaddict.com/episode/123491755
Episode: https://chtbl.com/track/224G4/https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/cdn.simplecast.com/audio/46d9ff78-39b5-4502-a5e9-0df217e1b3a7/episodes/8cce412e-4918-47a3-8e58-7a4a3272f16f/audio/497c4f93-391e-4116-9107-b5fda47cfd00/default_tc.mp3?aid=rss_feed&feed=66QlUXEg

Many episodes of this podcast deal with cognitive biases that can hinder our decision-making abilities. In this episode of Choiceology with Katy Milkman, we look at a different kind of error: how completely irrelevant information can negatively influence our judgments, making them varied and unpredictable. This variability of human judgment—or noise—is the topic of a new book by Nobel Prize-winning economist Daniel Kahneman, with Cass Sunstein and Olivier Sibony. You’ll hear an interview with Kahneman later in the episode where he explains his preoccupation with the substantial and expensive effects of noise. He proposes ways to reduce the problem of noise for industries, businesses, and individuals who need to make more objective judgements. But first, we’ll dive into the world of wine judging. G.M. “Pooch” Pucilowski will take you on a guided tour of the California State Fair Commercial Wine Competition. You’ll hear about the criteria for judging different varietals—and the accompanying challenges that wine judges face as they swirl, sniff, and sip through dozens and sometimes hundreds of different wines. After years of coordinating and observing the judges, Pooch noticed a large amount of variability in the results. This may not be surprising, since taste is subjective. But after some tweaks to the process, he even began to notice that judges were inconsistent with themselves! Enter vintner and retired oceanographer Robert Hodgson. Pooch teamed up with Hodgson to devise a way to study and improve the consistency of wine judging and push for a more objective competition. The results were promising, but not without controversy. You can read Robert Hodgson’s research paper on wine judging here. G.M. “Pooch” Pucilowski is a speaker, writer, wine judge, and educator. He runs wine appreciation classes through his University of Wine. You’ll also hear about the potential role of chemical analysis and artificial intelligence in improving the results of wine judging from James Hutchinson, formerly of the Royal Society of Chemistry and currently CEO of KiwiNet. And finally, Katy explores the potential of leveraging noise to produce better decisions by employing the wisdom of crowds—and even “the crowd within.”

Dirty Life

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Dirty Life!

Walking around the Rodgers Center, or basically any rural dairy country in Upstate NY you can’t help but notice the smell of silage, the mud and manure, the rundown barns and old and decrepit farm homes. Good ol dairy country can be pungent depending on the time of year.

With work, I’ve also had the opportunity to travel to New York City and Coney Island and canvassed public housing buildings in the city. They’re often quite diapilated and in rough shape, dirty grimy buildings with enormous piles of garbage.

Suburbia likes to hide the mud and manure that makes the world go round. It’s a plastic world, the suburbs buy food wrapped in plastic far away from the smells of the farm and buried in a distant garbage dump. Let the working folk deal with the smells and dirt of the real world. But denialism doesn’t make it disappear.

Poverty and the debris that makes up our world is often seen as something to look down at, almost sub human. Those dirty tenements and farms. But it’s a lot closer to reality than the suburbanite would want to admit. Cows and diesel tractors, are real life. As the piles of garbage that sit outside of the blighted buildings in the city. We all consume natural resources and we all generate waste – it’s all part of who we are as a species. Even though the suburbanite is in denial.

Farm along Mile Strip Road

NY City

Social stigma – Wikipedia

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Social stigma – Wikipedia

Stigma is a Greek word that in its origins referred to a type of marking or the tattoo that was cut or burned into the skin of criminals, slaves, or traitors in order to visibly identify them as blemished or morally polluted persons. These individuals were to be avoided particularly in public places.

After 50 Years Of The War On Drugs, ‘What Good Is It Doing For Us?’

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After 50 Years Of The War On Drugs, ‘What Good Is It Doing For Us?’

When Aaron Hinton walked through the housing project in Brownsville on a recent summer afternoon, he voiced love and pride for this tightknit, but troubled working-class neighborhood in New York City where he grew up.

He pointed to a community garden, the lush plots of vegetables and flowers tended by volunteers, and to the library where he has led after-school programs for kids.

But he also expressed deep rage and sorrow over the scars left by the nation's 50-year-long War on Drugs. "What good is it doing for us?" Hinton asked.

As the United States' harsh approach to drug use and addiction hits the half-century milestone, this question is being asked by a growing number of lawmakers, public health experts and community leaders.

In many parts of the U.S., some of the most severe policies implemented during the drug war are being scaled back or scrapped altogether.