Recent Comments

1. 6 days ago on Phoebe and Her Unicorn

   “It burns in Arizona! I don’t know how anyone can tolerate the heat!”

   You can get a t-shirt showing a skeleton leaning against a saguaro, saying, “But it’s a dry heat.”

   (My years in North Carolina proved to me that this is right—high-humidity heat is much worse.)

2. 7 days ago on Non Sequitur

   Or, we can have the assessor throw a die: if it comes up 1, then the claim is approved, otherwise not. “Don’t blame me, blame the die.”

3. 7 days ago on Non Sequitur

   Well, not to belabour the point, but how is the AI supposed to be “trained”? “Here are a bunch of historic claims and the human decisions that were made about them”? or “Here are a bunch of criteria you can apply to claims”? Actually, how were the humans “trained” to assess claims on the order of “The patient’s doctor thinks that X is the right treatment, but without examining the patient, and from afar, do you think that the doctor is right?”

4. 7 days ago on Non Sequitur

   I’m still not quite clear about the difference. The AI is presumably programmed by company employees, is intended to implement company policies, and, by the company’s decision, is used to examine claims and apply those policies. Like a human claims examiner. Can the company claim something like, “We have nothing to do with the decisions, we are just following the AI’s orders,” with straight faces?

5. 8 days ago on Non Sequitur

   “Did you know they [United HealhCare] use an artificial intelligence robot to pre-process the claims and it’s got something like a 90% rejection rate?”

   I see a lot of criticism of United HealthCare’s use of AI to reject claims, and I don’t quite understand it. What’s the difference between a rejection-inclined AI and a rejection-inclined flunky with a “NO” rubber stamp?

   (Personally, I’ve very contented with the health care I get here in British Columbia. No premiums, no deductibles, no paperwork, no questions about pre-existing conditions, no having to make choices between my health and being able to pay rent. . .)

6. 10 days ago on Bloom County

   Yes, but other reports have him working as a zombie alongside Sookie Stackhouse. Another theory is that he didn’t die, just went home to his own planet.

7. 15 days ago on Doonesbury

   “I can already hear it:”

   Do a web search for the very well known joke “Prepare three envelopes”

8. 15 days ago on Doonesbury

   I’ve just read Craig Ungar’s Den of Spies: Reagan, Carter, and the Secret History of the Treason That Stole the White House. He presents some IMHO convincing evidence that Reagan Campaign operative William Casey actually did collude with the Iranian government to delay the release of US hostages held by Iran, in order to deny Carter the victory of having had them released under his own watch.

   This was, of course, a sort of re-run of the Nixon campaign’s collusion with the South Vietnamese government to scuttle the Paris Peace Talks in order to deny the Democrat’s being able to accomplish peace in Vietnam. This, combined with Nixon’s “Secret plan to win in Vietnam,” led to Nixon’s election, and the prolongation of the Vietnam War for another something like six years.

   Oh, those Republicans…

9. 16 days ago on Dick Tracy

   “And Se7en”

   I admit that I never saw that, but yeah, the MacGuffin.

10. 16 days ago on Luann

    “So the guy who made the tee shirts not only saw Toni nude but Brad also”

    Not necessarily. It’s very easy to get iron-on transfer paper, print on it an image with an ink-jet printer, and iron the image onto fabric. That’s why Brad mentioned “iron-on,” and that’s how I made custom labels for some of my wife’s quilts.