COVID accelerated end of rural hospitals: “The exodus began with the nursing staff. Many left in the first months of the pandemic for higher-paying urban hospitals …”

Link. California is going to extend coverage to undocumented and increase Medicaid reimbursement. This facility will likely reopen — for a time.

It’s very expensive to maintain a modern healthcare facility and rural areas are poor. They are also red, so it puts their GOP reps in a weird spot.

The Economist on the greatest threat to civilization in 2024: “Mr Trump’s claim to have won the election in 2020 was more than a lie: it was a cynical bet that he could manipulate and intimidate his compatriots, and it has worked.”

Link. If you don’t vote Biden you don’t get to complain about what happens to you.

“The election will be decided by tens of thousands of voters in just a handful of states. In 2024 the fate of the world will depend on their ballots.”

The last days of coding: “Ben and I would talk about a bit of software we wanted for the project. Then, a shockingly short time later, Ben would deliver it himself.”

Link. “GPT-4 on its own is, for the moment, a worse programmer than I am. Ben is much worse. But Ben plus GPT-4 is a dangerous thing.”

Of course humans will still code, but it will all be machine assisted. Not quite as inhuman as chess, but a step function all the same.

Kill the Vermin: “we didn’t say we were going to kill you and if you think we said that? We’re gonna kill you” is some end-stage language.”

Link. “That’s not even a dog whistle. It’s just a whistle… Ask MAGA to cheer for the death of something abstract, like Antifa, and they’ll do it all day. Ask them to stand by while their blue-haired child gets dragged away to a concentration camp? Some people will. Plenty of them won’t.”

Great Jedeed essay on Trump channeling his inner Hitler.