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thepoliticalpatient · 6 years

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What Doug Jones’s win means for healthcare

Democrat Doug Jones wins the special election in ALABAMA for a seat in the Senate!!! This is a very happy post that I never dreamed I’d get the chance to write.

There’s a lot that could be said about this and what it means for our political climate in general, but I’ll leave that to other blogs and news outlets who will write on it plenty. I want to talk about what flipping this seat means for healthcare!!

The only remaining plausible path to defeating the tax bill just opened up.

The tax bill became a healthcare bill when Senate Republicans decided to put a repeal of the ACA’s individual mandate into it, a move that is estimated to take health insurance away from 13 million people, resulting in 16 thousand deaths per year. It passed a preliminary vote in the Senate 51-49 a couple weeks ago, with just one Republican Senator - Bob Corker (R-TN) - defecting.

The Republicans’ majority has just gotten that much more narrow - 51-49 now - which means that, once Jones takes office, reconciliation bills will be able to be defeated with just 2 Republican defectors. Assuming Corker stays a no vote, this means that losing just Susan Collins would now be enough to kill this tax bill.

This is good news for us, because it’s looking increasingly likely that Collins may indeed defect. She was a holdout until she secured a few assurances from McConnell - that measures would be taken to stabilize the individual market, including reinsurance and restoring the cost sharing reduction payments killed earlier this year by Trump. McConnell promised her these, and so she cast her yes vote. But House Republicans are saying they won’t vote for any such stabilization bill. Now we are left to wonder - will Susan Collins acknowledge that the stabilization she requested is very unlikely to occur, and if so, will she retract her yes vote? If she does, this bill is DEAD in a post-Strange Senate.

But all of this only holds true if the vote happens after Jones takes office. And so…

McConnell and Ryan will start trying to shove the tax bill up our asses as fast as they can.

Jones doesn’t take office until early January, most likely, so McConnell and Ryan will start going into overdrive to pass the tax bill before then. Their success in doing so is still a very real possibility. So here’s what we must do:

Call Susan Collins and ask her to keep her word. She said she wouldn’t vote for tax reform unless she got market stabilization. The stabilization bill is not going to get through the House. She must acknowledge this and then keep her word.

Call your Republican Senators and remind them of the consequences of rushing legislation. The first version of the tax bill that was voted on contained a very significant mistake. Nobody noticed because nobody had time to read the bill before voting. Encourage them to prevent future embarrassing events such as these by following regular procedure, holding hearings, and generally slowing the fuck down.

Call Lisa Murkowski and remind her that taking healthcare away from 13M is just as bad now as it was in July when she voted against it. Lisa Murkowski voted against skinny repeal in July, but now all of a sudden she’s for it, and I have no idea what the fuck happened.

Call your Democratic Senators and urge them to use every delaying tactic they can. They can’t filibuster a budget reconciliation vote, but maybe there are still some tricks up their sleeves.

Call key House Republicans and ask them to flip their votes. Another path to defeating the tax bill is flipping 11 House votes. It’s a longshot, but it’s worth a mention.

Here’s the info:

Susan Collins: (202) 224-2523 Lisa Murkowski: (202) 224-6665 Key House Republicans: CA-10 Jeff Denham - 202-225-4520 CA-21 David Vladao - 202-225-4695 CA-25 Steve Knight - 202-225-1956 CA-39 Ed Royce - 202-225-4111 CA-45 Mimi Walters - 202-225-5611 CA-49 Darrell Issa - 202-225-3906 CO-06 Mike Coffman - 202-225-7882 FL-26 Carlos Curbelo - 202-225-2778 FL-27 Ileana Ros-Lehtinen - 202-225-3931 IA-01 Rod Blum - 202-225-2911 NY-22 Claudia Tenney - 202-225-3665 NY-24 John Katko - 202-225-3701 PA-06 Ryan Costello - 202-225-4315 PA-08 Brian Fitzpatrick - 202-225-4276 PA-15 Charlie Dent - 202-225-6411 TX-23 Will Hurd - 202-225-4511 VA-10 Barbara Comstock - 202-225-5136 WA-03 Jaime Herrera Beutler - 202-225-3536 WA-08 Dave Reichert - 202-225-7761

Finally,

Let’s give credit where it’s due.

Doug Jones won because Black voters showed up in record numbers and voted for him at a rate of 90%+. Our Black brothers and sisters are responsible for this awesome win, while our sorry white asses voted for Moore at a rate of 70%.

—

http://www.cnn.com/2017/12/01/politics/alabama-senate-scenarios-roy-moore/index.html

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/12/12/16761514/doug-jones-win-tax-reform

http://fivethirtyeight.com/live-blog/alabama-senate-election-results/

#doug jones #roy moore #alabama #special election #senate #tax bill #sneaky repeal #skinny repeal #essay post #healthcare #aca #affordable care act #obamacare #trumpcare #call to action

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annviscom · 3 years

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Year 3 - FMP

(14 April 2021)

‘Pamela Paul’s memories of reading are less about words and more about the experience. “I almost always remember where I was and I remember the book itself. I remember the physical object,” says Paul, the editor of The New York Times Book Review, who reads, it is fair to say, a lot of books. “I remember the edition; I remember the cover; I usually remember where I bought it, or who gave it to me. What I don’t remember—and it’s terrible—is everything else.”

For example, Paul told me she recently finished reading Walter Isaacson’s biography of Benjamin Franklin. “While I read that book, I knew not everything there was to know about Ben Franklin, but much of it, and I knew the general timeline of the American revolution,” she says. “Right now, two days later, I probably could not give you the timeline of the American revolution.”

Surely some people can read a book or watch a movie once and retain the plot perfectly. But for many, the experience of consuming culture is like filling up a bathtub, soaking in it, and then watching the water run down the drain. It might leave a film in the tub, but the rest is gone.

“Memory generally has a very intrinsic limitation,” says Faria Sana, an assistant professor of psychology at Athabasca University, in Canada. “It’s essentially a bottleneck.”

The “forgetting curve,” as it’s called, is steepest during the first 24 hours after you learn something. Exactly how much you forget, percentage-wise, varies, but unless you review the material, much of it slips down the drain after the first day, with more to follow in the days after, leaving you with a fraction of what you took in.

Presumably, memory has always been like this. But Jared Horvath, a research fellow at the University of Melbourne, says that the way people now consume information and entertainment has changed what type of memory we value—and it’s not the kind that helps you hold onto the plot of a movie you saw six months ago.

In the internet age, recall memory—the ability to spontaneously call information up in your mind—has become less necessary. It’s still good for bar trivia, or remembering your to-do list, but largely, Horvath says, what’s called recognition memory is more important. “So long as you know where that information is at and how to access it, then you don’t really need to recall it,” he says.

Research has shown that the internet functions as a sort of externalized memory. “When people expect to have future access to information, they have lower rates of recall of the information itself,” as one study puts it. But even before the internet existed, entertainment products have served as externalized memories for themselves. You don’t need to remember a quote from a book if you can just look it up. Once videotapes came along, you could review a movie or TV show fairly easily. There’s not a sense that if you don’t burn a piece of culture into your brain, that it will be lost forever.

With its streaming services and Wikipedia articles, the internet has lowered the stakes on remembering the culture we consume even further. But it’s hardly as if we remembered it all before.

Plato was a famous early curmudgeon when it came to the dangers of externalizing memory. In the dialogue Plato wrote between Socrates and the aristocrat Phaedrus, Socrates tells a story about the god Theuth discovering “the use of letters.” The Egyptian king Thamus says to Theuth:

This discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves.

(Of course, Plato’s ideas are only accessible to us today because he wrote them down.)

“[In the dialogue] Socrates hates writing because he thinks it’s going to kill memory,” Horvath says. “And he’s right. Writing absolutely killed memory. But think of all the incredible things we got because of writing. I wouldn’t trade writing for a better recall memory, ever.” Perhaps the internet offers a similar tradeoff: You can access and consume as much information and entertainment as you want, but you won’t retain most of it.

It’s true that people often shove more into their brains than they can possibly hold. Last year, Horvath and his colleagues at the University of Melbourne found that those who binge-watched TV shows forgot the content of them much more quickly than people who watched one episode a week. Right after finishing the show, the binge-watchers scored the highest on a quiz about it, but after 140 days, they scored lower than the weekly viewers. They also reported enjoying the show less than did people who watched it once a day, or weekly.

People are binging on the written word, too. In 2009, the average American encountered 100,000 words a day, even if they didn’t “read” all of them. It’s hard to imagine that’s decreased in the nine years since. In “Binge-Reading Disorder,” an article for The Morning News, Nikkitha Bakshani analyzes the meaning of this statistic. “Reading is a nuanced word,” she writes, “but the most common kind of reading is likely reading as consumption: where we read, especially on the internet, merely to acquire information. Information that stands no chance of becoming knowledge unless it ‘sticks.’”

Or, as Horvath puts it: “It’s the momentary giggle and then you want another giggle. It’s not about actually learning anything. It’s about getting a momentary experience to feel as though you’ve learned something.”

The lesson from his binge-watching study is that if you want to remember the things you watch and read, space them out. I used to get irritated in school when an English-class syllabus would have us read only three chapters a week, but there was a good reason for that. Memories get reinforced the more you recall them, Horvath says. If you read a book all in one stretch—on an airplane, say—you’re just holding the story in your working memory that whole time. “You’re never actually reaccessing it,” he says.

Sana says that often when we read, there’s a false “feeling of fluency.” The information is flowing in, we’re understanding it, it seems like it is smoothly collating itself into a binder to be slotted onto the shelves of our brains. “But it actually doesn’t stick unless you put effort into it and concentrate and engage in certain strategies that will help you remember.”

People might do that when they study, or read something for work, but it seems unlikely that in their leisure time they’re going to take notes on Gilmore Girls to quiz themselves later. “You could be seeing and hearing, but you might not be noticing and listening,” Sana says. “Which is, I think, most of the time what we do.”

Still, not all memories that wander are lost. Some of them may just be lurking, inaccessible, until the right cue pops them back up—perhaps a pre-episode “Previously on Gilmore Girls” recap, or a conversation with a friend about a book you’ve both read. Memory is “all associations, essentially,” Sana says.

That may explain why Paul and others remember the context in which they read a book without remembering its contents. Paul has kept a “book of books,” or “Bob,” since she was in high school—an analog form of externalized memory—in which she writes down every book she reads. “Bob offers immediate access to where I’ve been, psychologically and geographically, at any given moment in my life,” she explains in My Life With Bob, a book she wrote about her book of books. “Each entry conjures a memory that may have otherwise gotten lost or blurred with time.”

In a piece for The New Yorker called “The Curse of Reading and Forgetting,” Ian Crouch writes, “reading has many facets, one of which might be the rather indescribable, and naturally fleeting, mix of thought and emotion and sensory manipulations that happen in the moment and then fade. How much of reading, then, is just a kind of narcissism—a marker of who you were and what you were thinking when you encountered a text?”

To me, it doesn’t seem like narcissism to remember life’s seasons by the art that filled them—the spring of romance novels, the winter of true crime. But it’s true enough that if you consume culture in the hopes of building a mental library that can be referred to at any time, you’re likely to be disappointed.

Books, shows, movies, and songs aren’t files we upload to our brains—they’re part of the tapestry of life, woven in with everything else. From a distance, it may become harder to see a single thread clearly, but it’s still in there.

“It’d be really cool if memories were just clean—information comes in and now you have a memory for that fact,” Horvath says. “But in truth, all memories are everything.”’

#level6 #fmp #research

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newstfionline · 6 years

Text

Why We Forget Most of the Books We Read

Julie Beck, The Atlantic, Jan. 26, 2018

Pamela Paul’s memories of reading are less about words and more about the experience. “I almost always remember where I was and I remember the book itself. I remember the physical object,” says Paul, the editor of The New York Times Book Review, who reads, it is fair to say, a lot of books. “I remember the edition; I remember the cover; I usually remember where I bought it, or who gave it to me. What I don’t remember--and it’s terrible--is everything else.”

“Memory generally has a very intrinsic limitation,” says Faria Sana, an assistant professor of psychology at Athabasca University, in Canada. “It’s essentially a bottleneck.”

Presumably, memory has always been like this. But Jared Horvath, a research fellow at the University of Melbourne, says that the way people now consume information and entertainment has changed what type of memory we value--and it’s not the kind that helps you hold onto the plot of a movie you saw six months ago.

In the internet age, recall memory--the ability to spontaneously call information up in your mind--has become less necessary. It’s still good for bar trivia, or remembering your to-do list, but largely, Horvath says, what’s called recognition memory is more important. “So long as you know where that information is at and how to access it, then you don’t really need to recall it,” he says.

With its streaming services and Wikipedia articles, the internet has lowered the stakes on remembering the culture we consume even further. But it’s hardly as if we remembered it all before.

(Of course, Plato’s ideas are only accessible to us today because he wrote them down.)

The lesson from his binge-watching study is that if you want to remember the things you watch and read, space them out. I used to get irritated in school when an English-class syllabus would have us read only three chapters a week, but there was a good reason for that. Memories get reinforced the more you recall them, Horvath says. If you read a book all in one stretch--on an airplane, say--you’re just holding the story in your working memory that whole time. “You’re never actually reaccessing it,” he says.

Still, not all memories that wander are lost. Some of them may just be lurking, inaccessible, until the right cue pops them back up--perhaps a pre-episode “Previously on Gilmore Girls” recap, or a conversation with a friend about a book you’ve both read. Memory is “all associations, essentially,” Sana says.

That may explain why Paul and others remember the context in which they read a book without remembering its contents. Paul has kept a “book of books,” or “Bob,” since she was in high school--an analog form of externalized memory--in which she writes down every book she reads. “Bob offers immediate access to where I’ve been, psychologically and geographically, at any given moment in my life,” she explains in My Life With Bob, a book she wrote about her book of books. “Each entry conjures a memory that may have otherwise gotten lost or blurred with time.”

In a piece for The New Yorker called “The Curse of Reading and Forgetting,” Ian Crouch writes, “reading has many facets, one of which might be the rather indescribable, and naturally fleeting, mix of thought and emotion and sensory manipulations that happen in the moment and then fade. How much of reading, then, is just a kind of narcissism--a marker of who you were and what you were thinking when you encountered a text?”

To me, it doesn’t seem like narcissism to remember life’s seasons by the art that filled them--the spring of romance novels, the winter of true crime. But it’s true enough that if you consume culture in the hopes of building a mental library that can be referred to at any time, you’re likely to be disappointed.

Books, shows, movies, and songs aren’t files we upload to our brains--they’re part of the tapestry of life, woven in with everything else. From a distance, it may become harder to see a single thread clearly, but it’s still in there.

#memory and reading #reading and memory #recall memory

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