Un•AI•ify

LASIK eye surgery cost $2,200 per eye in 2000. Today it's around $1,000 per eye despite 24 years of inflation. Meanwhile, an MRI that cost $1,200 in 2000 now costs $3,000+. The difference? LASIK operates in a free market with no insurance interference and minimal regulation. When patients pay directly, providers must compete on price and quality. LASIK clinics advertise prices, offer financing, and constantly improve technology to attract customers. Compare this to hospital procedures where prices are hidden, patients never see bills, and insurance companies negotiate opaque rates that somehow always increase faster than inflation. Cosmetic surgery follows the same pattern. Breast augmentation, rhinoplasty, and other elective procedures have become more affordable and safer over decades. Surgeons invest in better techniques and equipment because they must satisfy paying customers, not insurance bureaucrats or hospital administrators focused on maximizing reimbursements. The lesson is clear: remove third-party payment systems and excessive regulation, and you get Austrian economics in action. Prices fall, quality rises, and innovation accelerates. Healthcare costs aren't rising because of aging populations or new technology—they're rising because we've destroyed the price mechanism that makes markets work.

The pervasiveness of AI writing now is unnerving. CMOs and experienced, credentialed professionals communications pass off AI writing as their own. YouTube channels born in the last 1-2 years with content full of stock video and overt AI written scripts getting 10s of thousands of subscribers. Almost no one seems to notice and few care. If you know, you see the dangers of this dynamic. AI content getting passed off and laundered into being "manmade" by authorities, content influencing in the shadows (or on social media), AI writing changing beliefs by coming in the backdoor unchallenged by critical thinking ... All of this is bad. Then there's the ability to command into existence ever more content, "fiat content" created with AI is like fiat money. It raises the total supply and undermines the value of existing content while making it a fool's game to spend time and energy to create the old fashioned way... Without back pressure against this behavior, runaway dynamics take over and you get a hyperinflation of content. This last part undermines our ability to filter signal and noise, to make sense of what's what. We can't even have a common set of facts, a common ground anymore. Almost no one is talking about this, which you point out, is most unsettling. What can we do?