Starting this year, all hospitals are required to list their prices for elective services. Whether you have insurance or plan to pay cash – find and compare prices below.

Search for pacemaker and several options come up, with prices that vary by thousands of bucks. There are more than a thousand charges for different types of screws used in surgeries, some costing hundreds of dollars, others in the thousands.

Even finding out the charge for a Tylenol isn’t as easy as it might seem. Piedmont’s chargemaster for its Atlanta hospital has all sorts of variations of “acetaminophen.” Some are pills that also include hyrocodone, some have codeine, and the strengths vary along with the list prices that run from about $30 to over $500.

The federal rule requiring hospital price publication.

Federal taxpayers spent $38B+ in back door electronic medical record subsidies from 2009 – 2018 (!)

Mr. Biden has said he plans to make a priority of passing a law against domestic terrorism.

Arnold speaks.

Big Tech is the new deep state

Trump Twitter ban ‘raises regulation questions’

Twitter deletes China embassy’s Xinjiang ’emancipation’ tweet

“I have read and agree to the Terms” is the biggest lie on the web. We aim to fix that.

Ugandan Govt blocks Google Playstore, Apple AppStore, and YouTube

Two Worlds: So Much Prosperity, So Much Skepticism

How Moderna’s overnight vaccine success was 33 years in the making

The platforms have acted, raising hard questions about technology and democracy.

Airbnb canceling and blocking DC reservations during inauguration week

Was Vaccine Production Actually Delayed?

Censorship resistance

Laura Poitras open letter

Apple reportedly scrapped plans to fully secure iCloud backups after FBI intervention

But the world and US of 2008 no longer exist?

California Covid-19 Vaccine Availability

Thousands of Covid-19 vaccines wind up in the garbage because of fed, state guidelines

Assessing Mandatory Stay?at?Home and Business Closure Effects on the Spread of COVID?19

Applied Divinity Studies:

How high are rejection rates? It depends on who you ask. In ascending order:

• Kaiser Family Foundation reports a rejection rate of 27%, and 29% for healthcare workers.

• A global survey published in Nature reports 28% of people do not agree they would get a vaccine.

• The Public Policy Institute of California reports that 40% of adults and 69% of African Americans “probably or definitely” would not get the vaccine,

• The Wall Street Journal reports a National Association of Health Care Assistants survey claiming “nearly 72% of certified nursing assistants didn’t want to receive the vaccine”.

• The AP reports nurses have a rejection rate as high as 80% at some nursing homes.

Jeremy Grantham:

The long, long bull market since 2009 has finally matured into a fully-fledged epic bubble. Featuring extreme overvaluation, explosive price increases, frenzied issuance, and hysterically speculative investor behavior, I believe this event will be recorded as one of the great bubbles of financial history, right along with the South Sea bubble, 1929, and 2000.

These great bubbles are where fortunes are made and lost – and where investors truly prove their mettle. For positioning a portfolio to avoid the worst pain of a major bubble breaking is likely the most difficult part. Every career incentive in the industry and every fault of individual human psychology will work toward sucking investors in.

But this bubble will burst in due time, no matter how hard the Fed tries to support it, with consequent damaging effects on the economy and on portfolios. Make no mistake – for the majority of investors today, this could very well be the most important event of your investing lives. Speaking as an old student and historian of markets, it is intellectually exciting and terrifying at the same time. It is a privilege to ride through a market like this one more time.

“The one reality that you can never change is that a higher-priced asset will produce a lower return than a lower-priced asset. You can’t have your cake and eat it. You can enjoy it now, or you can enjoy it steadily in the distant future, but not both – and the price we pay for having this market go higher and higher is a lower 10-year return from the peak.”1

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WhatsApp Soundly Beaten By Apple’s Stunning New iMessage Update

CET update

30 Years Since the Human Genome Project Began, What’s Next?

Police may access (Covid contact tracing) TraceTogether data for investigations: Desmond Tan

Here are the biggest acts of media malfeasance in 2020

Michigan man spends 37 years in prison, freed after witness says she lied

Deaths of Despair and the Incidence of Excess Mortality in 2020

The Lab-Leak Hypothesis

Predictions Scorecard, 2021 January 01

Top 10 Marketing Follies of 2020

Resources on transmission & prevention of COVID-19

The DC political Newsletters by Politico, Axios and Punchbowl are ALL sponsored by Facebook.

What I’ve Learned in 45 Years in the Software Industry

Politics After Trump

The Indus Valley Playbook

As was the case with 9/11, our response to #AttemptedCoup (unauthorized entry of a capitol building by protesters) will cost generations of citizens their freedoms.

“Second Doses” post-mortem

Bellingcat breaks stories that newsrooms envy — using methods newsrooms avoid; “but you are a journalist and that is unacceptable”

DID YOU KNOW: Comrade Xi Jinping … cannot be “de-platformed.”

The Capitol Attack Doesn’t Justify Expanding Surveillance

Hello! You’ve Been Referred Here Because You’re Wrong About Section 230 Of The Communications Decency Act

Historic snowfall in Spain, Madrid airport closed

Rod Dreher:

Yesterday we saw a coordinated movement of Big Tech against Trump and his closest supporters. Trump himself has been cut off from nearly all forms of social media, and even his e-mail provider cut him off. Big Tech is moving against Parler, the right-wing alternative to Twitter. This is just the beginning. As Culper observes, the culture-war weaponization of corporate America has given the Left a massive advantage. As I have written in The Benedict Option and Live Not By Lies, in a country like ours, when Big Business takes sides in the culture war, the advantage is overwhelming.

Analysis: 2005-2011 Predictions for Digital Life 2020

2020, the year of everything fake

Los Angeles Locked Down. Covid Came Anyway.

The Road to Revolution

Notes on technology in the 2020s

Return of the Strong Gods: Understanding the New Right

How an obscure British PC maker invented ARM and changed the world

Ten Charts That Tell the Weird Story of Oil and Energy in 2020

The Wuhan Lab-Leak Hypothesis Goes Mainstream

Overdose deaths far outpace COVID-19 deaths in San Francisco

Learn the Knowledge of London

How to cook a medieval feast: 11 recipes from the Middle Ages

A Car That Connects Father, Son and Land-Speed Racing History

Jay Leno on How Driving Changed in 2020—and How It Will Change Even More

Artisans clustered along a Naples street have been crafting Nativity scenes for more than a century. But coronavirus restrictions and a dearth of tourists are threatening their survival.

FT People of the Year: BioNTech’s Ugur Sahin and Ozlem Tureci

I took FSFE to court. This is my story

Lockdowns may actually prevent a natural weakening of this disease

Leaving Hong Kong: As China cracks down, a family makes a wrenching decision

Coronavirus tracker: The FT has gathered and analysed data on excess mortality — the numbers of deaths over and above the historical average — across the globe, and has found that numbers of deaths in some countries are more than 50 per cent higher than usual. In many countries, these excess deaths exceed reported numbers of Covid-19 deaths by large margins.

God and the Pandemic

Why I’m Losing Trust in the Institutions

With Hacking, the United States Needs to Stop Playing the Victim

Facebook Managers Trash Their Own Ad Targeting.

Who and what will rise and fall in status?