*squints* wait what does communism have to do with not "liv[ing] in a secluded home with their one marriage partner" though
all bad things are related and all good things are related.
this is why ending capitalism (a bad thing!) will also end racism, homophobia, the nuclear family, child abuse, exploitation, climate change, and death itself.
(if it turns out that some people have different opinions on which things are good and which things are bad then you just repeat it louder).
but more specifically some people are pining for an aesthetic of communal living and believe that everyone else is too or are willing to force it upon them if not.
Conservatives have so much fucking nerve talking about how “ENVIRONMENTAL REGULATIONS ARE OUT OF CONTROL” when absolutely no-one feels inconvenienced by them or has ever even encountered them in their personal lives unless they’re the CEO’s of a megaconglomerate bitter that they couldn’t rip up a national park and buy like their fifth house boat
Yeah, it’s literally the Kochs saying “It’s so UNFAIR that when the oil pipelines we own but don’t maintain bust and flood a town with toxic sludge, that WE have to pay to fix it.” and “An employee we forced to clean chemical storage tanks without the proper gear for 15 years developed cancer, and they’re allowed to sue us over it? TYRANNY!!”
How is it never occurred to me to put it like this before?
this honestly comes off as pretty silly and out-of-touch, because there are of course plenty of people who get laid off in industries that are subject to environmental regulations, and while it’s certainly possible to make an empirical case that, say, coal regulations have little to do with the decline of coal jobs, it’s at least plausible that there is some effect.
of course the solution to this is that you need a full employment economy so that losing any particular job doesn’t mean losing a job, period, but until you do so (and obviously there are general capitalist interests against having a genuinely full employment economy outside of wartime) there will be entirely understandable resistance among certain fractions of labor against things (environmental regulations, immigration, labor-saving machinery) that are extremely good in themselves
I would argue against immigration being a general good in itself, but…
Wage subsidies with low minimum wage would get us pretty close to full employment without harming workers (in terms of net income) or crashing the economy (it has support from economists).
Admittedly I’m kind of a broken record, here, but it seems like something that could actually happen without a revolution and without potentially ruining everything.
blue-komrade said: But where is the line between ethnocentric nation states and empire anyway. The major european nations all descend from multi lingual, multi ethnic empires… Or is that your point?
yes, the construction of a homogeneous French identity, German identity, Italian identity, etc.
pushing common languages and suppressing dialects, as happened more recently in China and Indonesia.
and forcible movement of people to line up with national borders, as took place at various intervals throughout the 20th century.
Sometimes this is used to argue that nations aren’t really real in any valuable sense, but once you go up enough contrarianism levels from the normies you wrap around and say “actually, constructing nations is Good.”
Sometimes it strikes me as really really immoral that schools exist. They seem like an almost universally terrible experience, though I suppose that might be biased by who I discuss things with.
I don’t really see why more people haven’t tried something different, especially considering how painful the entire thing is. You’d think that the Elite would at least realize that school sucked.
Maybe it’s a way for them to control their children, though.
it’s free childcare
I don’t think so, though- there are easier ways to get free childcare. It’s probably aimed at edifying the children and preparing them for adulthood.
It is often not-great at that. This is quite possibly an organizational problem, in that it’s very hard to control and also educate a large number of people who often have a bad grasp of their own preferences and long-term needs.
What it probably comes down to is that a standardized set of Stuff to Learn and ways to judge that is far easier and more coherent to measure and encourage. In general people want to make sure that schools are Actually Working to educate children, and standardization gives them a good measure.
(To be clear, it is perfectly reasonable to want schools to Actually Work and I myself would like, in theory, to ensure that schools Actually Work. It is just the implementation that is often botched.)
It is way harder, less reliable, and probably leads to more upset or worried parents to set up a non-railroady, truly open-ended experience. It might also have not-that-many appreciable benefits, except to a few students.
School is probably also in some sense a competition for positional goods and status. If your kid doesn’t go to school, then they’ll lose out! If they don’t get into this school they will be a loser forever. I suppose that part of this is also tradition/family based.
(I’ll address other responses later today.)
Please keep in mind that the supply of high-IQ individuals to run both our nation’s institutions and industries is very limited.
Someone posted this on facebook and I sort of can’t stop thinking about how bad it (and the report it’s based on) is. Not in an it’s-wrong-about-literally-everything way, but in the conceptual and mathematical dog’s breakfast of a calculation that is the hook of this article.
Anyway, I suspect some of my mutuals might enjoy tearing it apart.
I was expecting generic anti free trade stuff, but the article I’m reading here is about tax dodging, noxious debt practices, and outright theft.
“Theft” is hyperbole. Tax dodging and predatory lending are legit problems where foreign interests are at fault. Others are problems that are not fully or at all attributable to “us.”
There are some more particular issues with the analysis, but the general point is that the calculation is pseudomercantilist nonsense, confusing currency with wealth.
For instance, it puts direct investment on one side of the ledger, and profit repatriation on the other, notes that the profit is greater than the investment, and calls that theft. But, like, that’s what capital is–you put in some, you get more out. Anything else is not capital, it’s aid.
The neoliberal point is that investment creates wealth, much of which will stay in Africa. That wealth is hard to quantify, but includes money paid to local employees and that money’s movement in the local economy, the resulting upward pressure on salaries, the provision of necessary products and services, the multiplying effects that these products and services might have on the local economy (e.g. IT, transportation, automation), the know-how that foreign companies bring into the local market, and quite a bit more. I can’t speak for Africa in particular, but I’ve seen it happen in Brazil.
(The same logic works for loans–you pay more than you take. And while some of those are in fact abusive, there’s no inkling in the paper of the idea that loans are not universally abusive and might have a role in creating wealth.)
Not to mention that much of what is lost is not about outside powers but rather the failure or nonexistence of local institutions. Leftist analysis of how foreign economic interests have undermined the formation of these institutions is important, but insufficient.
Overall, I’m against the simplistic but pervasive idea that all that needs to happen for countries to develop is for foreign “plunder” to stop. Foreign powers can help by policing tax evasion, by policing the trade of illegal extractivism, by policing damage to the environment and by providing fair loans, sure. But most of the work is internal–in the development of local institutions and economy.
When I say ‘theft’ I am referring to their complaint of “illegal logging, fishing and trade in wildlife.“
And your description of “profit“ works equally well for theft‘ or fraud, you get more money out than you put in for those as well. They are describing how wealth can leave in that amount, and you have to ask. “Is ordinary profit sufficient to get that level of return?“ Or is it theft and fraud going on there?
And loans can create wealth, but one of the nice things about ordinary lending is bankruptcy. With sovereign debt it’s a bit harder, and the US has a whole industry talking foreign leaders into large debts that cannot be repaid and cause crisis, and can end with IMF programs that force reforms on countries that they are now admitting do not work.
And is this debt used to finance productive investments? A lot of these projects are not. A lot of these are the product of bribery and fraud. But that’s OK, because then you or the next dude can sell off bits of the country to pay them off. That’s how this type of debt can work.
They need more to develop than the stoppage of plunder, yeah, but it’s hard to do that when you’re being plundered.
Calling illegal logging, fishing and poaching “theft” is exactly what I was referring to as hyperbole. The harm is in lost tax revenue and environmental damage–there is no outright theft going on.
(Also, most products of illegal extractivism, by far, go to China. Does that make it less “our” fault?)
The issue is that the logic of the calculation is that all loans and all investment are going to be net-negatives. The only logical conclusion is that Africa is better off with zero debts (business and sovereign) and zero investment.
Taking this further–let’s talk a little about Brazil, because it’s a case I know well. Brazil basically eliminated its foreign debts. It did this essentially by converting that debt into government bonds. By all accounts, this has worsened the situation. The financial market is far less forgiving–defaulting would tank the economy, no relief of forgiveness programs possible because the bonds are distributed, so there’s no single entity to negotiate with.
We’re embroiled in a historic corruption scandal that involves the President, most of his cabinet, the leaders of both houses of Congress and most of the congresspeople therein. This involves extensive graft schemes, largely connected to a meat conglomerate, a construction giant and a publicly-administered oil and gas company–Brazilian-owned and -run companies all.
Where I’m trying to get at is this: a kleptocracy is a kleptocracy. If foreign companies are knee-deep in corruption, then local companies and politicians are chin-deep. Africa is not poor because it’s being plundered, Africa is poor because Africa does not have the institutions and local conditions to be rich. Forgiving debts and policing corruption in foreign multinationals will help, but will not lift Africa out of poverty.
(The study points to a yearly deficit of $41 billion, which sounds like a lot, until you realize that’s less than 40 bucks per person per year. Even if those figures made any kind of sense, this is definitely not what is impoverishing Africa.)
What else can help? Exporting Western institutions is called colonialism and it’s a bad scene. What we have left apart from aid (much of which is counter-productive) is loans and investment, while hoping for the best as institutions develop locally.
“Removing without the permission of the legal authority“ is the
goddamn definition of theft. You can argue that it’s not the government
that’s being stolen from, but rampant theft tends not to improve the
economy even when it’s not the government’s property being stolen. And those resources are what those governments
could use to get capital rather than loans.
You are arguing that kleptocracy retards development. I can argue that it’s development that retards kleptocracy. While the US was developing we were a massively corrupt nation, we had whole political systems based on giving political jobs to friends and the transcontinental railroad was an amazingly corrupt endeavor from start to finish. But we developed, and now we are less corrupt.
The thing about debt is that, it can prevent development. It prevents it because instead of building schools and roads or even just pay off troublemakers to shut up, you have to scrape together everything you can sell for foreign exchange. It means that, rather than attract kleptocrats who benefit from a growing pie, you attract kleptocrats who extract and cheat to get money. And you get your country taken over, previously by armed forces, now by the IMF. Then the measures they need to take to develop become even more impossible.
Given the poverty that many people in Africa are living under 40 bucks per person per year ain’t nothing, that’s a good start on roads and school that they can then use to make more money to build more roads and schools. I don’t claim that that they’ll instantly industrialize, but I think it would help.
And the argument is not so much that loans are net-negative, but that loans should pay for themselves. The fact that those countries remain creditors suggests that they are not. You may believe this is the result of good faith attempts at investment, I think that’s bullshit.
I think it’s both kleptocracy and lack of development that empower each other. Low trust society is a sort of local stable equilibrium that makes everything more expensive at once. Suggesting that it’s just lack of development is reducing humans to economybots. It also suggests that societies with lower levels of technology - basically every society before 1950 - must necessarily have been more and more corrupt, and that managing corruption was something essentially impossible in some place like ancient China or feudal Japan.
Within this consideration, I’m not sure on how to manage this. I have some ideas that a more ideal nation could execute, but hooooo boy most modern Liberals and Leftists would not like it.
Libertarianism / AnarchoCapitalism / Minarchism - The belief that class action lawsuit waivers as mandatory conditions of employment show that low-level employees really want this and deserve it, and that there is no sort of questionable negotiating leverage involved which might undermine the sanctity of the deal.
Knowing that (even) you can get laid with Tinder makes me feel even worse about myself. The most action I've gotten is that I went ice skating once.
I’m reasonably attractive and can play an alpha male, so I get laid easily. I just really don’t want to, and that makes me feel like shit. When I act feminine, women shit on me too.
I’m somewhat confused by all the hatred for lawns – people saying that they are useless.
I don’t disagree that they are costly in terms of water and some kinds of maintenance. A better material culture would have fewer of them and there seem to be some perverse expectations (even regulations sometimes) that various landscaped areas should have lawns rather than other, more appropriate plants or landscape.
However, it’s totally obvious what lawns are for, to me. They’re for kids to play on or to play soccer or run around or sit for a picnic or whatever. And I don’t see why people don’t get *any* of that.
These people don’t have kids. Furthermore, children are so removed from their social circle and frame of mind that they don’t even think about what they would use the lawn for if they did have kids.
(Or they live in dense urban areas where playgrounds are no more than a few blocks away.)
I think it’s more the latter, but even a bit further. The broader model people are using here I think is “suburbia is cancer,” which I think is accurate even (especially?) if you have kids. It gets you suburban-brand Safety at the cost of making you into a suburbanite. Like yeah, there are reasons people make that tradeoff, but it’s hard to argue that it isn’t an example of widespread civilizational inadequacy. @sinesalvatorem@michaelblume back me up here.
OK, let’s actually talk about this. Why? What does “making you into a suburbanite” mean?
Unsurprisingly, I’ve had this exact conversation with a lot of people who are reflexively hostile to the suburbs. The answers I’ve gotten mostly seem to boil down to some combination of four things:
1) Prestige. We all know that only boring thick-necked American morons like the suburbs! You don’t want to be one of them, do you?
2) Aesthetics. To which, well, sure, you’re allowed to like or not-like whatever you want, but then this falls into the general category of “if you’re going to be vehemently angry about enforcing an aesthetic preference you should at least own up to it.”
3) The suburban lack of Social Culture in the form of clubs, neighborhood bars, Town Spirit, etc. There are obviously people for whom this is a legitimately a big deal. But I’d be surprised if it were a meaningful motivating factor amongst the hordes of introverted Internet nerds who mostly want to hang out with their friends and wish that they could just not have to deal with the rest of the world.
4) Environmental issues. Which are of course real and salient, and to the extent that’s what you mean, I’m not going to object. But people don’t generally talk about suburbia like “this is an awesome thing that we’re sadly going to have to give up to save the planet…”
…is that, in fact, it? Am I missing something? Where is all the “civilizational cancer” stuff coming from?
From my own personal standpoint, suburbia seems like a super good deal all around, except for the fact that you might want to have kids someday. You get lots of space at an almost-reasonable price! And privacy! And pretty trees! And you can still get to pretty much anything you want within like forty-five minutes, which is really not that much worse than living in most parts of a major city! It’s just a shame that, if you raise children in the suburbs, you’re signing up for them being totally dependent on your willingness to drive them to any single thing they might ever want to do…
Forty-five minutes? In a reasonably dense city with decent transit you have everything within less than half that.
Density is more than just Social Culture, and even for introverted nerds Social Culture that needs density is a benefit. Good luck trying to start an anime club in Bumfuck, Nowhere when the number of people inside a 45 minute drive is small, and then trying to get them together. Assuming they have cars, of course. Density significantly helps hanging out with friends, you know. And it means there can be better places for it.
Even if you don’t want to see anyone at all, the goods you have access to in a dense city are so much more diverse.
Also you know what the worst kind of having to deal with people is? Traffic. I don’t get how people can stand driving for like 2 hours every day. Driving is boring at best and traffic SUCKS. (Yes, I own a car.)
When I lived in Cincinnati, it was much more reliably 30-45 minutes to get anywhere else in the city, than when I lived in New York when I needed to book 1-2 hours to get to another borough.
But ignoring that empirical fact… @balioc and others aren’t arguing about whether you’d prefer suburbia or urbia, but “why do people hate the existence of suburbs so much?” “Can’t form an anime club” seems to be a weird rationale to despite other people for choosing to live there.
I don’t actually hate suburbs that much, I hate the rules that suburbanize what are supposed to be “cities”. We have one actual decent city in the US (Manhattan) and I think we could stand to have a few more, so that everyone who wants to live in a Real City doesn’t have to live in Manhattan.
I liked living in a relatively small town (Tuscaloosa) a whole lot better than living in the suburbs of D.C.
Mainly because the traffic didn’t turn to complete shit every morning and evening—because hey, the capacity of the roads was actually proportionate to the population. (That’s the problem: there’s not enough roads! The beltway should be like three times wider.)
It was just a lot quicker to drive everywhere in general.
On the other hand, it was not the location of a huge number of think tanks, etc. to work at.
Generally speaking, if you build that many roads, the parking situation eats you alive.
Given that the average Manhattan apartment is about twice the size of a parking space and support….
That’s why I think self-driving cars are going to really transform cities, if the government will get out of the way.
Still doesn’t really solve the parking problem. It opens up new options, but new options means: “Car parks itself a neighborhood over”, not “Let’s get rid of these forever”.
I think it does solve it?
For one, people can rent them on-demand instead of having a car that’s not in use the vast majority of the time.
For excess capacity (or for those who still want to pay the premium for their own, private car @the or , they can valet-park themselves in huge warehouses on cheap land outside the city center.
It vastly reduces the number of cars that need to be parked, and solves the bigger problem of needing them to be parked right next to where the user lives/works, in spots that are individually accessible. Most of the space in parking garages is empty, to allow the cars to get in and out. If they can drive themselves, you could park 20 in a row, end-to-end.
The basic problem is that it’s still not in use the vast majority of the time.
A lot of people seem to think self-driving cars will be like regular cars, except you can multitask while commuting.
I (and apparently also @voxette-vk – I knew I liked her for a reason) think self-driving cars will end up being Ubers for 1/3 the price.
So, like, most of the price of an Uber is the driver’s time. With self-driving cars, a robot’s time is significantly less expensive than a human’s – basically free. You’d be paying the marginal cost per mile (which you’d have to pay if you owned the car, too) and the company’s profit margin, in exchange for not having to buy the car itself.
Basically, if you use self-driving Ubers or whatever Waymo’s equivalent is (apparently self-driving Lyfts), you effectively get a car for free. Who would want to own a car if they could get one for free?
Well, one reason might be so you could have a car in your garage whenever you need it. You’d have to pay for a parking space (which in cities can get pretty expensive, and in suburbs trades off against having a larger house), but you’d get instant access to a car, instead of having to wait for a self-driving Uber.
How long would it take to get a self-driving Uber, anyway? Currently it’s around five minutes, but if their price dropped drastically, they’d probably be popular and common enough to be around a minute. Is that worth paying for a car and a parking space and insurance?
And, sure, the self-driving taxi company (Uber or whatever) is going to need a profit margin, but they aren’t going to demand so high a profit margin to prevent themselves from replacing most personally-owned cars.
That’s not actually the problem.
The problem is that on any given day, 90% of people are boring.
They wake up, go to work, go home, maybe stop at the grocery store. This is why rush hour exists in the first place. There’s two enormous, tremendous spikes in demand for 2-3 hours in the morning and evening, and then pretty much nobody uses anything for the other 18 hours of the day and they can be handled with a tenth of your capacity.
So a world in which Uber has no parking problems is:
A world in which demand at 9:23 PM on a Tuesday goes way up and demand at 5:30 goes way, way, way down.
A world in which rush hour traffic has been replaced by hour-long waits/10x surge pricing for your taxi home.
Self-driving cars will improve this scenario immensely (Pool, warehouses a neighborhood over, giving 3-4 rides every morning). They won’t solve it entirely. Most of your cars aren’t being used 80% of the day, where do they sit when they aren’t being used?
/And then of course, there’s the special hell that is LA and their housing/jobs mismatches. That’ll be the real test.
I feel like 90% is a severe overestimate. Do you really think rush hour means that 90% of all cars in existence in a city are on the road at the same time? I feel like “below 50%” is probably more accurate.
Assuming rush hour lasts 2 hours and the average commute is half an hour, this gives a minimum of 75% reduction in cars even if every single car in the city is used during rush hour (which I still think is a serious overestimate). I guess if you consider that rush hour is mostly one way, you might cut it down to 60%. I think fewer than half of cars in a city are used during rush hour, so I’d guess 85% reduction.
And grouping up (like UberPool) is a lot easier to coordinate in a self-driving taxi system. Assuming half of people UberPool, we’re now at 90% reduction.
So parking space demand would decrease 90%. But also consider that during non-peak hours, self-driving cars can drive a decent distance to park. So the densest parts of cities won’t need parking in like a 30-mile radius.
This gets even easier if most of the trip can be taken on a train of some kind.
Hmm. What if the interior of a car became more like a semi trailer, where you would get in, be automatically connected to a train by your taxi, then transferred between trains by more taxis, none of which ever travels outside of a mile or so radius?
(still doesn’t solve the problem of privacy though)
I’m a bit concerned, as “the poor don’t have to own cars” means “the poor won’t own cars” (as their wages will shrink to reflect this) which has been at least somewhat of a buffer against homelessness in this country.
And the marketeer types aren’t going to want to do anything about that, because they rarely ever do, as either they think suffering is justified or they cover themselves with platitudes about private charity that is frankly just not going to materialize.
WW’s concern about privacy is valid. The car company will have round-the-clock cameras in cars so that they can fine people for leaving messes or damaging them.
Additionally, there are concerns not even on the radar, such as that currently the spare vehicular capacity is enough to evacuate an entire city, but won’t be under this plan. But then I can’t convince people to up the level of emergency readiness generally, and if I had my way the level of North American civil defense might accidentally convince foreigners that we were preparing to survive nuclear war, so…
“A Gallup poll in June 2015 found that almost 70% of U.S. millennials would be willing to vote for a socialist presidential candidate. Even more shocking, a poll conducted before this year’s presidential election by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation found that barely half of millennials believe ‘Communism was or is a problem.’
The same poll found that a quarter of millennials hold favorable opinions of Vladimir Lenin, while 18% think favorably of Mao Zedong. More than 10% even have positive feelings about Joseph Stalin.”
Side effect of the Republicans calling everything to the Left of Thatcher “Socialism” tbh. It was bound to have consequences eventually.
The general... concept of "how did we get here" is echoing loudly through my mind and I don't know what to do about it. "We" being the human race and "here" being our state of sin. I mean, I know intellectually, but it's just, at any point, we could have... not? Sinned? And we didn't. Not sin.
I’m not sure how to answer this, except “blessed be thou, oh Lord, who has sent his son…”
Osama bin Laden uses the word “Palestine” 13 times in his letter explaining his actions while having just a few throw-away paragraphs on women, sex, gambling, etc.
Admittedly if Palestine wasn’t an issue it’s tough to say that Islamic supremacists would say okay that’s fine pack up and go home no need to agitate for our religion any more.
True, but if not for the prominence of US imperialism they’d have a far more difficult time finding significant bases of support.
we could stop feting Malala and leave Pakistan to its own devices, I guess?
Who needs Palestine? Give the territory to Jordan and Egypt, demobilize the whole identity, and it’s no longer under Israeli rule.
Also, if you want the US OUT of the Middle East, staging a terrorist attack that literally kills thousands of people, thus providing the political will to invade middle eastern countries that did not previously exist for a President that was just barely elected is the opposite of what you should do.
And you know what? I’d much fucking rather have “GET THE FUCK OUT OF THE MID EAST AMERICA! REEEEEEE!” as the running Mid-East origin terrorist campaign, since while it would be ten times as expensive in terms of destroyed Western infrastructure, it might stop dumbass American politicians from interfering in the Mid East again, and again, and going “no this time will be different and it totally won’t just simultaneously kill people and waste absurd amounts of money”.
Dear Leftists: Stop virtue signaling to make you look good on social media, no amount of virtue signaling is going to bring back the dead or stop the terrorist attacks. You Leftists are morally bankrupt so your virtue signaling is pretentious.
If you want to practice Islam in the inconsequential, semi-secular sense. Fine. But the only way to solve this problem is to recognize that POLITICAL Islam and anyone who follows its prescription is inherently incompatible with western values.
That means:
Want sharia courts? You’re not welcome.
Think it’s okay to marry a 6 year old? You’re not welcome.
Think it’s okay to strike your wife for ANY reason? You’re not welcome.
Believe in ANY kind of punishment for apostasy? You’re not welcome.
Believe in ANY kind of punishment for “blasphemy”? You’re not welcome.
Period. These are the kinds of values that progressives would defend
against any radical Christians who believe any of the above. And
rightfully so. So why can’t we all agree on these universally? Anyone
who holds any of those beliefs is by definition, incompatible with the
western world.
People are giving President Trump crap for calling them “losers”.
Listen, the guy isn’t eloquent, but he’s right. These terrorists fear
shame more than death. It’s why Abu Graib was such an outrage when
American, female soldiers stripped them naked and laughed at them while
dogs barked. To them, that is a far greater punishment than death or
even torture. If any American received said treatment at the hands of
ISIS, we’d thank the lord above that we weren’t being burnt alive in
cages.
We don’t merely punish terrorists through death. We punish them through
shame. At least ONE leader is willing to give it the old college try. So
today, I stand with the President of the United States, instead of
trying to mince words on social media and virtue-signal about how much
“unity” we need.
the evil that is political Islam. To unite with it’s practitioners would be to unite with evil. Anyone who sees that as a virtue is simply enabling evil and by proxy, is evil themselves.
can you legitimately imagine waking up and seeing the bombing of innocent people just to see a concert and spouting some pure vitriol like this? like how must it feel to know that you are trying to push your islamaphobic views in the wake of a tragedy like this? like maybe i’m too much of a “morally bankrupt” leftist to get it but ok
“HOW DARE YOU implicate the Communist Party in this famine which was an entirely predictable consequence of Communist policy about which we were warned repeatedly!? Don’t you care about the victims at all?!”
Look man,
I know someone with a URL like libtards-are-cancer is not gonna be the most charitable guy towards liberalism, but these terrorist attacks are ideological in nature, and they were completely preventable. Japan does not have Islamic terrorist attacks, and it is not because they work so hard to love and tolerate Muslims. Unfortunately that ship has sailed, but something different needs to be done, and it starts with acknowledging that there is no law of the universe that religions have to be equally dangerous.
i’ve got bad adhd that i don’t do much to address (thanks to my bad adhd) so I would actually like to thank the discourse for making me aware of fidget toys
I’m trying caffeine + L-Theanine but my situation is more mild, and I’m not sure if it’s working yet due to poor sleep.
You: “Dude, you are the lamest person imaginable.”
Me: “Impossible! The lamest person imaginable is someone who is lame in all respects and to the highest degree. Now, in the respect of existence, clearly it is lamer not to exist than to exist. Thus, it is impossible that the lamest person imaginable should exist. Therefore, I am not the lamest person imaginable. QED”
>wake up with a lot of pent-up aggression and anger with no real viable outlet
Yeah this can’t be healthy lmao
The funniest thing is that my lack of an outlet is part of the reason I’m so angry. I’m mad because there aren’t really socially accepted spaces for me to vent my emotions, so if I want to talk about how I feel I need to go to the Dark Corners Of The Internet
i do actually think a communist revolution in Japan or Australia would increase life expectancy-
oh fuck me
I… I just… Japan has one of the highest life expectancies on Earth. Communist revolution generally tends not to be so great. How does someone even reach this level of misunderstanding?
With Taiwan recognising gay marriages it’s time to update predictions for China, Japan, and Korea.
I still think Korea will be last, but it’s tough to decide whether Japan or China will go first.
Either way if Australia still can’t pull its head out of its butt in the next 24 months someone is going to have to crash another 4wd into parliament house.
fuck, no divorce yet? someone ought to get on that.
I think you’re way too optiministic about China. At best you’ll get some very local recognition in big cities like shanghai, for legal and tax purposes.
pragmatic!
How would Singapore fare? Would it come in behind China, Korea and Japan?
wow good question, and what about Hong Kong??
Regarding Singapore, the rumor I’ve heard is that Lee softened on gays in his old age, but they didn’t get rid of the laws so much as not really enforce them. While I admire some of their policies, this is not one of them.
Theresa May killed more than 50 kids. Thatcher killed more than 50 kids. Clinton killed more than 50 kids. Trump killed more than 50 kids. Just realize the facts for once.
Theresa May killed more than 50 kids. Thatcher killed more than 50 kids. Clinton killed more than 50 kids. Trump killed more than 50 kids. Just realize the facts for once.
I’m working on a higher quality blog post for the main site on this, but for right now I’d like to point out a novel idea. Consider this quote from the article
A single-payer system likely “would be more efficient in delivering health care,” said Larry Levitt, a senior vice president at the Kaiser Family Foundation. (California Healthline is produced by Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent program of the Kaiser Family Foundation.)
But the proposal expands coverage to all and eliminates premiums, copayments and deductibles for enrollees, and that would cost more money, Levitt said. “You can bet that opponents will highlight the 15 percent tax, even though there are also big premium savings for employers and individuals,” he added.
We always hear this. “Single payer health care will save so much money because of all the efficiencies that you can get from central management”
Is this true? Well it just so happens we have a real-world example: HMOs. For example, Kaiser Permanente, the entity referenced in the above quote.
(an aside for non-US readers: in the US, health care is generally privately provisioned, and fee-for-service. That is, if you want a doctor to do a thing, you give them money, and they do the thing. Most people have some kind of health insurance, and this tends to take one of two forms: HMO or PPO.
PPOs are standard, and flexible. In a PPO, the insurance company develops a “network of providers”, a set of doctors who have agreed to work with the insurance company. You are strongly encouraged to go see one of these doctors. If you choose to see a different doctor, “out of network”, your insurance will cover a smaller fraction of the cost. This remains fee-for-service, it’s just that insurance pays.
HMOs, on the other hand, take a very centralized approach. They are one large company responsible for catering to your health needs. In an HMO, you can only go to doctors at facilities run by the HMO. If you need a specialist, you must get a referral to a specialist who works for the HMO. Since everything is integrated, it’s easier for multiple doctors to coordinate and work together. However, your choice of doctor is severely limited. With a PPO, if you don’t like your doctor you can get a new one. Under HMOs, your choices are limited)
The description of HMOs sound a lot like single-payer health care writ small. You give lots of money upfront to an organization like Kaiser (you pay lots of money in taxes to the government to support health care), and in return you go to Kaiser-affiliated facilities (government-funded hospitals) where all of your care is provided to you by one entity. The centralization facilitates efficiencies as bureaucracies are cut, and your needs are taken care of as best they can.
So, approaching the problem from a different point of view: Single-payer government-provided health care is more-or-less the same as if everybody signed up for Kaiser.
This gave me a deliciously trollish idea, an argument to bring out whenever relevant. Let’s say you’re arguing with some commies who insist that single-payer is the best/only solution. Pose to them this hypothetical:
“Would you be in support of a law that gave $HEALTH_INSURANCE_COMPANY a legally-mandated monopoly in health care, at the cost of forcing them to become a non-profit organization?”
Imagine one way to implement single-payer government-provided universal health care:
1) Give Kaiser a legal monopoly on health insurance
2) Legally require Kaiser to be a non-profit.¹
I suspect that most of your commie friends would be incredibly opposed to this idea, and yet it is fundamentally the same thing as a state-run single-payer health, with two caveats
a) You aren’t legally required to opt-in. You can still pay expenses out-of-pocket instead.
b) Instead of the health system being run by whoever is friendliest with our elected representatives, it’s run by people with a proven track record of success in that field.
I suspect this argument generalizes, too. You could apply it to any realm of government service provision that you can think of. It might help a handful of the smarter, more intellectually ethical folks see things from a different perspective.
1. Kaiser IS ALREADY A NON-PROFIT. So much for “greedy health insurance corporations ruining everything in their greedy corrupt quest for more profit”
The way single payer works is that it negotiates prices with providers which it can do because it’s the only buyer. It’s the same way Singapore does it, it’s just there they set legally prices but don’t pay them. Maybe you should look at how this shit works instead of just imagining how it works.
I still laughed. TBH I don’t understand why the Repubs don’t spring for healthcare vouchers. Well, okay, I understand why but …
