How the Sausage Is Made
A lamentation from inside the Cathedral walls
Never mentioned it on my own Substack because it isn’t relevant to my schtick and I am making some attempt at anonymity on the internet, but… I’m SO aggravated by my work situation that I just have to get this off my chest.
POV: You’re in the Online Right
I pay the bills by being a “data scientist,” a trendy term for “guy who writes reports and makes charts.” It’s a step down from a statistician and a step up from a sociologist. I say “sociologist” because 90% of my co-workers are exactly that: “doctors” in sociology. People hear “data scientist” and think “oh, they employed computer geniuses to solve real world problems!” But no, it’s more like “they taught political activists how to use SQL.”
I’ve got a background in database management, writing real-ass code for real-ass money-making endeavors, for as many hyphenated-phrases as possible. I know my SQL, and I was down on my luck during the pandemic lockdowns when an old buddy said “hey, you know database stuff, you don’t need medical or statistics knowledge, just get in here and I’ll pay you to code.” I took him up on the offer because I enjoy having a roof over my foid’s head.
My buddy has since left the company, and now I’m stuck with my lesbian CEO, my gay supervisor, and all these other (mostly Indian) medical doctoral students, who for whatever reason wasted several years and thousands of dollars on their medical degrees, only to troon out and take a pass on the residency part. Now they’re resigned to being “Subject Matter Experts” or Excel crankers. When they’re not med-school dropouts, they’re sociology “doctors.” The “making an impact” feel is so thick in the air, you could cut it with a knife.
We specialize in Medicaid reporting, where I’m a fish out of water because I don’t know medical nor statistical shit. Stuff that’s, like, judgement calls on when something is statistically (in)significant, or “best practices” on separating wheat from chaff, or what exact set of Obamacare codes are relevant to a topic, all that shit is beyond me. Did you know that “having a baby” actually has like 80+ codes for different situations? Not just if your baby is head-first or feet-first, but like pre-mature, on time, late, delivered by C-Section, already stillborn when the C-Section happened, delivered by vagina after a C-Section failed, delivered stillborn by vagina after a C-Section failed, delivered by vagina after C-Section was attempted but then the mom chickened out and asked not to, etc? Like, autistic levels of detail.
As a not-doctor, not-autistic statistician, how the FUCK am I supposed to know what all codes might be pertinent to the query, here?! Maybe I could Grok that, but then the state government(s) I work for shit(s) their pants about possible HIPAA violations or cybersecurity risks. Fine, whatever. I’m left to flounder and flail at the data until the results just feel more or less realistic. But honestly, I don’t even know what’s real. It’s not like a software you can debug to meet a spec or fulfill a function, like “When I push button, I should receive bacon.”
I need you to feed me a spec, and then I do the thing, and then you leave me alone. Instead, I’m dealing with live insurance claims being haggled in real time between huge corps, healthcare providers, and the state. The claims I pull today may not actually be there tomorrow, or be there with different values, or I pulled codes for black and white patients, but forgot to add the code for mulatto patients, and need to do it over again, fuck. NOBODY TOLD ME THERE WAS A MULATTO CODE!!
Imposter Syndrome, Except They’re The Imposters
None of that matters, because I know that my real job in Medicaid data mining is just harvesting “facts” for future leftist academics to leverage into “promoting public policy changes.” I provide them with the ammunition to call me a racist.
Every month we have an “all hands” meeting in my data analysis contracting company. I gotta listen to this (very nice and upbeat) lesbian CEO harpy drone on about how we’re “making an impact” (by the time I’m done, that phrase will make your skin crawl, too). She couches her ham-fisted leftie political opinions in cutesy “not to ruffle any feathers” or “sorry, my politics are showing!” phrases, to make off-hand disparaging comments about male-dominated spaces, or Trump voters noticing fraud, or COVID lies.
Speaking of liberals drinking their own Kool-Aid, I ended up being the guy who hand-entered the new mRNA gene therap— er, “vaccine” codes, into our system as they were released, and my heart sank into my stomach at the description field: “intended for infants 0-6 mos.” ;_;
As a liberal, my boss can steamroll her perspective over our day-to-day tasks, trying to “fix society.” Meanwhile, I have to be VERY cautious about expressing any opinion or noticing I have under her “open door policy.” It’s super annoying, particularly because I’m a natural schmoozer, and I wish I could relate and jive, but I know the knives are out.
My boss is a Cathedral operative, and I have to work for her to feed my children (unless one of you in the private sector can hire me as a Scrum Master, pretty pretty please, slide into my DMs). She and I both have Boston Lithuanian blood, so I can feed her some pierogis and sweet-talk her into giving me a free parking pass for the garage, but the whole time I am revolted. It’s the moralizing, blue-pilled frame, clueless to the destruction she’s wreaking, that bothers me most. From the lesbo thing to the girlboss attitude, to her role in dismantling functional society, one subtle twist of a report at a time.
You’ve Had Enough Mash, Now For The Bangers
Here’s what I mean. For the past quarter or so, I’ve been gathering the data for my client state’s birth outcomes. That’s like “how many pregnancies ended in abortion,” “how many were stillborn,” “how many were white, black, or no-one-cares-because-they-don’t-serve-the-BLM-agenda,” “how many moms died in childbirth,” etc. It’s depressing shit that I’d rather not think about, especially when I picture my own darling 10 lb. white-ass, freckly baby girl not making it when she was an infant. She’s a plucky 80 lb. 10-year-old now and a fucking tank, but what if, right?
My favorite, my absolute favorite metric to check for, was the March Of Dimes defined “Disparity Ratio.” The idea is, you divide all your data by race. Then you take the race that is doing the best — with the assumption that it’s always the wypipo — and you remove their results, then average the results of all the other races and make a fraction: the “best performing group” over “urryone elts.” That gives you the Disparity Ratio, which by definition can NEVER be 1. I guess that tracks with reality. I mean, can any random measurement of a thing be exactly the amount of a different random measurement of a similar, but not exactly the same, thing? A Disparity Ratio of 1 means “Communism UNLOCKED,” and a ratio of a decimal or more over 1.00 is a measure of “how far we have to go before Communism ACHIEVED.” It’s a digital readout of precisely what level of racist wypipo be in dat arya. Exactly how or why, you would or could, derive that conclusion because two numbers are different, I’m not sure, but that’s obviously the implication. It’s a loaded game from the outset.
It’s so loaded that if you end up with a result less than 1 (when White people are not the best-off group in your metric), it’s assumed that you did your math wrong. It says it right there in the first paragraph (not the intro blurb) of the methodology instructions: “The disparity ratio is always a number greater than 1 (e.g., 1.26).” So what happens when the best performing group isn’t White people?
TFW You’re a Moldbug Punchline
So my Indian and gay supervisors (two different people) told me to take my ratios of wymyn who died 42 days or less after childbirth, and get Disparity Ratios of White Wymyns compared to Black Wymyns, and White Wymyns compared to Other Wymyns. It was funny when they struggled trying to figure out how a handful of Medicaid ID#s were marked Female for several years, but then suddenly marked Male in the reporting period requested, and they weren’t sure how to handle whether or not they should be excluded from the results. I mean, the spec asks how many WOMEN died after childbirth, not how many “men” died after… child… birth. Let’s be consistent on which minorities we’re defending, here! Their cognitive dissonance gave away the game as far as why this metric even exists.
But IMO more hilariously, in my particular client state I’m working on… the dead black moms were noticeably fewer than the dead white moms. By any slice, by county, by year, by sub-contracted insurance plan, by anything. Odd, I know, especially for a Medicaid-only population, you’d figure the majority of them are black, right? You racist, you.
When I submitted my results to my liberal superiors, they were in quite the huff. “Oh Top Shelf, you noob, you MUST have done something wrong!” They examined my code, and they re-wrote the code themselves. They pushed up against the same database, and lo and behold, the black moms in this state really WERE dying less often due to childbirth than the white moms! Who knew!?
So here’s me with my less-than-1 Disparity Ratios being like, “Soooo when can we present this to the Medicaid Director? The state Congress? The Governor?? Would love to see a little more attention paid to the poor ol’ wypipo. Maybe get some of that gubment gibs moolah headed their way.” Of course, I can’t actually say this, even with my best “not to ruffle any feathers” hedging. The alternative was to address their discomfort directly, take the March of Dimes spec literally, and— God FORBID— put the BLACK people numbers on the top of the fraction as the best performing group, then lump in the White numbers with all the other races and compare—
Yeah that was a bridge too far. INCONCEIVABLE! My supervisors were scrambling to find another explanation. “Ah, but there are less than 20 deaths in the black category for that year!” “Oh but there are more unreported races in that year than there are black people! So you don’t know how many of the ‘unknowns’ are actually black!” Every “mathematical,” “scientific integrity” excuse in the Best Practices book was thrown at my findings. Until finally, the lynchpin: “We just don’t have enough statistically significant, unambiguous data to report on this metric. We will just have to drop this measure from the report entirely.”
“Manipulating procedural outcomes.” The absolutely evil euphemism of Faggot King “Dr.” Timothy Burke rang in my ears. This was it. These were my hands holding the meat, feeding it into the sausage grinder, the grinder that manipulates procedural outcomes. ”Democracy Dies In Darkness” struck a harmonic tone too. Something about Thomas Carlyle and there being lies, damned lies, and statistics. I was part of the propaganda machine, supporting an empire that wants my Trad-ish Catholic ass dead, but who I’ll simp to, just to pay down my debt in a fiat-currency-driven horseshit economy.
It’s too bad that the state I’m reporting on seems to have really great results for black moms having babies, and dying less often in the process! Really bad. Would be really bad for journalists to find out about this, how horrific that they might have some good news for black people! That would be bad for the greater good. The greater good of Gay Race Communism would surely suffer if we were to notice where it was winning.
While “Data Science” is a blooming and prolific field right now, God rest your soul if you land one of these jobs. In my experience, they’re mostly contractors for the gubment, which in and of itself is retarded. I mean srsly tho, think this through.
Poor people can’t afford healthcare coverage, but it’s a moral imperative that they get it.
Healthcare corporations won’t lower their prices to a range that poor people could afford; that’s just not fiscally sensible.
It’s the government’s job to do the things that society needs, but can’t turn a profit from, like holding criminals in prison. Therefore the government should pay for poor people’s healthcare coverage!
The government seems to be really bad at paying for poor people’s healthcare coverage using other people’s money. “It’s inefficient,” they say. Too costly. Hm. Maybe they forgot about Step 2 back there...
Ah! The solution is for the government to sub-contract out the healthcare coverage for the poor to… profit-driven healthcare businesses! THEY know how to run things efficiently and innovate to save costs!
Suddenly it’s profitable for healthcare corporations to provide coverage for the poor!
The fuck am I paying taxes for.
I was so grateful for DOGE, but it didn’t go far enough.
What Is To Be Done?
It’s not that I want poor people to suffer, I don’t. It’s dat flat red line, tho. Especially in contrast to the hill that follows.
Just look at the PROGRESS since Medicaid was established in 1965! (Pay no attention to the downward momentum it had beforehand.)
My argument is, like every other Neo-Reactionary argument, that the self-licking ice cream cone of democratic government allows every retarded-but-compassionate idea to be used as a crowbar to get more of your money into the system through ever more back doors being created from way-the-fuck-too-many cooks in the kitchen (your government “representatives”), who will whizz it away on waste and fraud, when they’re not blowing it on legit projects inefficiently.
What’s efficient, and effective if you can commit to it, is community. Patronage networks. Local charities, volunteering yourself. Fraternities.
Or hell, for the nexus of doing exactly my decent paying job, and having friends you can air out to just to keep your sanity, I recommend putting a slice or three of your paychecks toward the one-time payment to gain membership in the Tortuga Society. It’s an online pirate ship full of based nerds like you, ready to hardy-har-har at the absurdity created by the faggots you have to work with IRL. The pressure release valve alone is worth the price, fr, but we share skills and grift each other into gigs. It’s a good brotherhood. With a few based sisters, even. A network like this may just come through for you when you need it, and even enable you to plunder these woke corporations and steal your tax money back! GET DAT CHEEZ SON (OR DAUGHTER)!
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