BraveSirZaphod @ BraveSirZaphod @kbin.social

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Joined

2 yr. ago

The pathological inability some people have to not be able to accept any good news ever always surprises me.

I will gladly take literally any bet you like that, barring actual death, Joe Biden will be the DNC nominee. Find an escrow and name whatever bet you like.

Flying is also dramatically cheaper and more accessible today than it used to be.

If you want the fancy treatment from back then, pay the prices people paid back then and buy first class.

Ok, you mean I could be getting paid to not panic about Threads? If you have a referral link, I'd greatly appreciate it!

Implying that anyone who disagrees with you must be a paid shill is not the rhetorical dunk you apparently think it is.

Pretty much all presidents have unconditionally supported Israel, actually.

Which is to say, markets that actually matter.

Please quote a single instance where anyone here is encouraging people to receive care at the ER without paying for it, rather than simply stating the true fact that it is a thing that happens.

I'll wait.

Umm, I never suggested that I do this, or that anyone should do this. Calm down.

I'm saying that, regardless of what you or I think about it, emergency rooms are legally obligated to provide care for all people regardless of ability to pay, and people without insurance and in poverty know this.

I mean, that isn't incompatible with this system at all. Government ownership of the delivery system, which I'd fully agree is a good thing and one of the places where state ownership naturally fits, is still ownership.

The government generally isn't in the energy production business, so either they lock you into a monopoly with an energy producer, or you get to choose one. Either way, it's the same general system.

Not if you're poor and uninsured.

In that case, you can go to an emergency room, be guaranteed treatment, and just give a fake name or ignore the eventual bill that will sink your credit rating that you don't care about because you already aren't particularly eligible for credit.

I won't pretend to know the regulations in Indiana, but it's also entirely possible that startup costs or market conditions there don't really facilitate additional competitors. Utilities tend to become way less efficient as you get less dense, so I wouldn't be surprised if you don't really get much competition even if there aren't strong regulatory barriers. The market being open doesn't necessarily mean that it's profitable.

It's a separation between power generation and power delivery. We have the same thing in New York. Someone has to own the actual delivery infrastructure, which in NYC is generally this company called ConEdison. They'll also provide the generate power for you, but you have the right to switch to other providers. For instance, I could switch to a provider that generated all power from renewable sources, though it is naturally more expensive.

Already there actually and have had a pretty good experience, though it doesn't scratch that same Reddit-style itch nor is it trying to. It's chilling at somewhere around 100 million users, so I'm not the only one.

The point is that it's portraying not blocking as an inherently negative thing, which isn't universally agreed upon at all. Plenty of people would say that they don't need any attention at all. It's not presenting objective in a neutral way, but rather labeling a group as bad.

Of course, it's probably fair to assume that the author has no intention of being neutral, but it's still valid grounds to criticize it as a data visualization.

Yeah, a part of me wouldn't even hugely mind if these people do wind up leaving, because I've been increasingly getting a sense that I wouldn't hugely miss such great literature as "Suck on my balls Zuckerfuck"

And you're not engaging with literally anything I said, even the most basic things like the social security cap affecting far more non-billionaires, so I suppose I'll just give you the same amount of effort in return and dismiss you as a scientifically illiterate child, and we can both go on with our days.

You're not wrong fundamentally, but my point is that all of these actions would have various effects on the rest of the economy, and none would exclusively affect billionaires. There's this misconception that if only Bezos, Musk, and their friends paid some taxes for once, we could have single payer healthcare, and that math doesn't math.

Additional business taxes simply get passed on to the consumer in the price tag. You can say it's worth it, but it certainly doesn't exclusively affect the executive suite. Raising the Social Security cap would be a significant tax increase on the upper middle class. I don't have that much pity for them, but there are a lot more of them than a handful of billionaires, and they tend to be pretty important for winning elections. One of Biden's campaign promises was to not raise taxes on anyone making less than $400,000, and this would violate that. Raising capital gains taxes would have ripple effects throughout the economy, leading to less business investment overall, fewer new jobs, and more layoffs. Plenty of normal homeowners take advantage of tax breaks on home loans.

I'm not saying that any of these steps are inherently wrong, and they're all perfectly legitimate tools. But they do have real consequences, and we can't pretend that they don't. You can say that they'd be worth it - and hell - I'd probably agree with you, but the family in suburban New Jersey with two parents in middle management who will suddenly see a big tax increase is probably going to be less of a fan. There is no giant pot of 100 billionaires' money that we can raid without any consequences.

Multi-payer systems are also found in the Netherlands, Switzerland, Belgium, and Austria, by the way. Notorious hellscapes, the lot of them.

Yeah, I wonder how many of those instances are primarily enthusiasts self-hosting.

If the Threads-blocking instances have this level of maturity, I don't think we'll be missing much. Being equally childish as Facebook comments is impressive.