Short Takes #30: My Own Trouble
Louise Bourgeois | Short Takes: Employer Concentration, ChatGPT Health, Young Workers Opting Out Of Healthcare, Year-Round Daylight Saving Time, Got Milk?
I want to be the owner of my own trouble.
| Louise Bourgeois
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Bourgeois’ quote reminded me of the distinction between positive and negative liberty, as delineated by Isaiah Berlin.
There are supporters of “negative” liberty, best defined as freedom not to be interfered with. Negative liberties ensure that no person can seize his neighbour’s property by force or that there are no legal restrictions on speech. Then there are backers of “positive” liberty, which empowers individuals to pursue fulfilling, autonomous lives—even when doing so requires interference. Positive liberty might arise when the state educates its citizens. It might even lead the government to ban harmful products, such as usurious loans (for what truly free individual would choose them?).
| The Economist, Berlin, Rawls and Nozick
I suppose Bourgeois’ wish is an example — perhaps a shining example — of the overlap of negative and positive liberty: the freedom to be unmolested while pursuing a ‘fulfilling, autonomous’ life.
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Short Takes
Employer concentration is an enormous social ill.
Large corporations are both keeping their low-wage employees at or below the poverty line, and playing the American public as suckers, since our taxes are diverted to provide a social safety net for them, as Michael Sainato reports:
Many workers at some of the largest US corporations have no choice but to rely on healthcare and food assistance because of low wages, even as CEO compensation continues to grow, according to a
newreport releasedWednesday[March 04, 2026].The report, published by the Institute of Policy Studies, focuses on 20 of the S&P 500 corporations that have primarily US-based workforces and report the lowest median wages of the group.
Collectively, this “Low-Wage 20” employs 6.7 million people in the US. The median pay at a majority (75%) of the companies is lower than the income minimum for a family of three to be eligible for Medicaid in most states. At 13 of the companies, median pay was also lower than the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program income threshold for a family of three.
Nearly a quarter of Walmart employees (29.3%) and half of Amazon workers (48.4%) in Nevada – which collects Medicaid enrollment numbers among employees at large companies – were on Medicaid in 2024, according to the report.
These corporations should be regulated to pay a living wage. We should raise minimum wages, and impose additional regulations and taxes on giant corporations acting as cartels to immiserate the most powerless. More links in the footer.
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ChatGPT Health.
ChatGPT Health regularly misses the need for medical urgent care and frequently fails to detect suicidal ideation, a study of the AI platform has found, which experts worry could “feasibly lead to unnecessary harm and death”.
OpenAI launched the “Health” feature of ChatGPT to limited audiences in January, which it promotes as a way for users to “securely connect medical records and wellness apps” to generate health advice and responses. More than 40 million people reportedly ask ChatGPT for health-related advice every day.
The first independent safety evaluation of ChatGPT Health, published in the February edition of the journal Nature Medicine, found it under-triaged more than half of the cases presented to it.
| Melissa Davey, ‘Unbelievably dangerous’: experts sound alarm after ChatGPT Health fails to recognise medical emergencies
Isn’t this one of the areas where LLMs were supposed to excel?
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Speaking of health care.
Jena McGregor reports that some young, healthy workers are opting out of employer health-care plans:
Some 61% of workers who have the option to enroll in a company health plan did so in 2025, down from 64% in 2020, according to health policy organization KFF.
Workers dropping employer-based health insurance cite rising costs, and experts warn employers may see health-care costs rise if plans lose too many young, healthy members.
Economists warned this would happen as health care costs continue to rise, even for those with employer-provided plans. If we had universal healthcare this would not be an issue, note.
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The case for year-round daylight saving time.
Staying on daylight saving time year-round would prevent an estimated 36,550 collisions between deer and vehicles, whereas staying on standard time would add 73,660 of these collisions every year — a difference of more than 100,000. The human toll of staying on standard time would also be significant: Compared with year-round daylight saving time, year-round standard time would cause 100 more deaths, 6,000 more injuries and at least $3.5 billion in costs every year through increased deer-vehicle collisions alone.
Of course, having more crashes with deer is far from the only cost of standard time. The number of fatal traffic accidents at night — caused by deer or anything else — is three times as high as it is during the day, and in the dark the risk of pedestrian accidents is up to seven times as high. Permanent daylight saving time would prevent 366 fatal pedestrian and vehicle accidents a year with the help of brighter evenings during the four and a half months of the year we currently spend on standard time. Conversely, staying on standard time for an extra 7.5 months each year would add about 610 fatalities — a difference of nearly 1,000 human lives.
Year-round standard time shouldn’t even be considered.
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Got milk?
More than 750,000 immigrants left the U.S. labor force during the first half of 2025, according to the Pew Research Center, creating a growing challenge for industries that rely heavily on those workers. Dairy farming is near the top of that list: Immigrants make up more than half of that sector’s labor force.
Another administration could have promised that shifting away from immigrant labor would deliver real benefits without misleading Americans about the nature of those benefits. It could have sought to help family farms — for example, by providing low-cost financing for automation. It could have dealt openly and fairly with immigrants who will continue to milk many of the nation’s cows for years to come.
| Binyamin Appelbaum, 2026-02-09 Trump Wants More Jobs for Americans. He’s Getting More Robots Instead.
