bbase22 retweeted
Marc Andreessen reveals why housing, health care, and education keep getting more expensive while everything else gets cheaper
"There's basically three components to the American dream. A house near great job opportunities, great health care for you and your family, and sending your kids to good schools"
"If you disaggregate the economy over the last 25 years, everything that technology touches basically collapses in price. Television sets, computer games, anything with electronics in it. But if you chart housing, education, and health care, the prices of those things are skyrocketing"
"The government restricts supply, zoning laws and university certifications. And then the government responds to the political pressure caused by the rising prices by subsidizing demand. And of course, if you subsidize demand and a fixed supply, you get skyrocketing prices"
bbase22 retweeted
🚨🚨CRAZIEST STAT EVER🚨🚨
Legendary coaches Mike Ditka, Paul Brown, Don Shula, Chuck Noll, Urban Meyer, Jim Harbaugh, Nick Saban, Bo Schembechler, Lou Holtz, Bob Stoops, Les Miles, Ara Parseghian, Jim Tressel, Don James, Bill Cowher, Woody Hayes, Curt Cignetti, and Mike McCarthy were all born or raised within this 315-mile area.
18 football icons 🤯
The self interested gate-keeping will begin in virtually all fields as SI begins to take over
bbase22 retweeted
I understand that the social security conversation is political poison. But I’m not running for office so I don’t care about that. Taking huge chunks out of the paychecks of young working Americans in order to pay for the retirements of older Americans who have a net worth several times higher, all to prop up a system that everyone knows likely won’t be there when those younger people are retirement age themselves, is morally abhorrent and economically insane. Everyone knows it, too, but we’re held hostage by elderly politicians who refuse to surrender power, and older voters who, as a group (with exceptions, obviously), simply don’t care all that much about the financial and cultural future their grandchildren will inherit.
bbase22 retweeted
A surgeon who saves me $4,000 is welcome to make $1,000.
I hope he does it again tomorrow.
Somewhere in the healthcare debate, we became more offended by someone earning money than by the amount patients lose.
Give me the total price, the expected outcome, and a credible alternative. Let me decide whether the offer works.
If a physician builds a better service, charges less, and earns a healthy profit, I want more people copying him.
His success gives the expensive hospital a problem.
That seems useful.
bbase22 retweeted
Removing third party payments for routine care will solve most of our healthcare cost problems.
Don’t believe me? Think it’s only around the margins?
Look at @nikillinit’s bill for childbirth. Nearly $80k paid by his insurance and another $4k out of pocket.
Now look at the billboard for this hospital advertising cash pay. They can do the entire thing for less than what @nikillinit’s out of pocket!
Using insurance is a 20x markup. We see this over and over again. 10-30x markups with third party payment. Compare @SurgeryCenterOK’s prices to insurance. Compare what @AtlasMD charges for imaging and meds to what your insurance pays. Look at the comparisons @noahkaufmanmd has directly on his website.
Moving to a cash pay system for routine care doesn’t just save a few percentage points off cost. We are talking 50-80% reductions. Massive savings before you even factor in what competition will do to further drive down costs and increase quality.
We are talking about saving hundreds of billions, easily.
So how much does it cost to have a baby in the US? The Europeans are really gonna shit themselves at this one.
(caveats - based in new york, good commercial coverage, etc.)
We were billed ~$150K, our insurance paid ~$79K, and our out-of-pocket costs were ~$4300. And this was for a largely uneventful birth cost wise - NICU babies can end up as multi-hundreds of thousands of dollars to occasionally $1M+!
Why are we sharing all of this? IMO healthcare wins because patients are afraid to share their experiences with each other. We gained a lot by having friends who would share their stories with us. This is our family's small part of trying to break that information asymmetry.
bbase22 retweeted
"As special an experience as I've ever had in my life."
@StanfordSteve82 recaps an unforgettable experience in Iowa City 🖤💛
*Government subsidized* student loans are the cause of high tuition. If the schools or banks had to underwrite these loans higher education would change overnight.
bbase22 retweeted
It's so much worse than you all realize.
There's $1.8 Trillion in outstanding student loan debt. It just keeps going up.
It is completely irresponsible for the federal government to be subsidizing these loans. We're knowingly sending people to financial ruin.
Some examples:
bbase22 retweeted
Neat idea at a southern club where they bought a barrel and give out bottles to members that make an ace but must be kept on property🔥 Cheers🏌️🥃
bbase22 retweeted
Or....hear me out here. We take the government out of the student loan process and let the lenders dictate rate and terms to a marketplace. Watch tuition rates drop like stones when the fed isn't backing whatever numbers the colleges want to charge.
bbase22 retweeted
The hospital credentialing process needs a complete overhaul. Creating one standardized process across the US would significantly reduce administration and decrease healthcare costs as a result. There is absolutely no reason, that in 2026, it takes a physician in good standing, 3-6months or more to get credentialed at a hospital…
Gonna be a lot of union and political push back (at a detriment to safe outcomes and efficiency) as the world becomes more automated.
.@PalmerLuckey says Anduril’s first prototype, a firefighting tank, now sits under a tarp because unions shut it down:
“It could carry several tons of fire retardant and be used to protect critical infrastructure.”
“We built two fully working prototypes.”
“There were really strong unions that didn’t want robots to automate their jobs.”
“The governor was told if they funded this and procured it, the union would oppose him in the upcoming election.”
Fascinating reframing of the approach to AI with students
Ben Horowitz says instead of banning AI, educators should set problems students can't solve without it:
"I was talking to Dan Boneh, who is a great professor of computer science and cryptography at Stanford. His take on AI was: You have two choices. You can ban it, and by the way, that won't work. Or you can make the problems so hard that you can't solve them without AI."
"What he's seeing is, 'I've got students solving things that no student in history could have ever solved.' That's what's possible. You want to have that orientation: What can you solve with the tools? What can you do that's a breakthrough? Now everybody has an opportunity to create a breakthrough."
"Then you're a main character, not an NPC. That's what the academy is about. Do you want to be a main character? If you want to be a main character, we help you do that. If you want to be a cog in a machine, this is not going to be the best place for you."
@bhorowitz
bbase22 retweeted
I hope people realize that for the foreseeable future, the cost of healthcare benefits will get more people fired, or not hired, than AI
bbase22 retweeted
FBS oversight committee: Western Michigan beat Michigan. The refs were wrong. The result should be different. We saw it. You saw it. Everybody saw it.
But we’re not changing it because that would hurt Michigan and that’s not allowed.
The FBS Oversight Committee says in a statement that "instant replay protocols were not followed in the contest’s second-to-last play" in the Western Michigan-Michigan game, and "had the protocols been followed, the outcome of the game would have been different."
FBS oversight committee says it cannot overturn the result.
bbase22 retweeted
PETER THIEL CALLED IT.
The Antichrist wouldn’t build the doomsday machine.
This clip aged terrifyingly well.
Peter Thiel predicted in June, 26, 2025 exactly what is happening right now with Anthropic, Coxon and the AI-safety landscape.
“The way the Antichrist would take over the world is you talk about Armageddon non-stop, you talk about existential risk non-stop.”
The 'Antichrist' wouldn’t seize power by creating an AI apocalypse, but by CONVINCING everyone that the apocalypse was coming and then offering safety in exchange for CONTROL.
A must watch.
