CoderKat @ CoderKat @lemm.ee

I write bugs and sometimes features! I'm also @CoderKat@kbin.social.

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2 yr. ago

Ugh, you know what, I think you're absolutely right. That's gonna happen sooner or later. I dunno when, but I entirely expect it to eventually (or maybe very, very soon).

I think most republican voters simply care more about "other people can't get a free thing that I had to pay for" or "I don't want universal healthcare because I'm healthy and I don't need it". Which are both incredibly selfish mindsets. The GOP knows about these mindsets and does everything they can to encourage them.

I think they now are so far gone that they find it easier to convince voters by spreading propaganda than it is to win people with good policies. I think part of it is that on the policy front, there's stiff competition. But on the identity politics front, it's not even a competition. The GOP is massively better at propaganda and identity politics. They know they're better at it, which is why they've leaned so heavily into it while also having so little else to offer. Fixing problems often gets in the way of profit, so they don't have an incentive to actually fix many problems (at least not for normal people).

Eh, I don't think chronological order is the right order for this. That makes historically older rules have priority over newer ones even if they're outdated. The second amendment is the obvious example of amendments being outdated. Even if you are all for gun rights, I don't think you can argue that the amendment was written with modern weaponry in mind (and indeed, nobody argues that the average person should be allowed to own a fully functional tank).

And coming up with a better priority list would be impossible in the current political hurricane, as nobody would agree on the ordering.

Yeah, it's weird. The gaps in our healthcare are major problems that I want to see fixed and are great uses of taxes. It's bizarre that routine eye and teeth health aren't considered health, despite how much those tie into overall health.

And the prescriptions almost feel like a loophole. You can spend a few days in the hospital undergoing an expensive surgery. Every med you get while in the hospital is free. But the moment you get out of the hospital, any ongoing meds cost money. Prescriptions are apparently a lot cheaper than the US, but they can still get hefty especially for rarer things. Plus what is affordable varies. I can easily afford the approximately $100/mo of prescriptions that I have (I actually pay either zero or $1 per prescription because my work has great insurance -- not sure why it's sometimes $1 and other times free), but for people living paycheque to paycheque, that's a lot of money and lower pay jobs often have no insurance at all (since it mostly covers dental, vision, prescriptions, and some minor others, medical insurance isn't viewed as quite so vital by many Canadians -- I think that's allowed quite a lot of companies to feel comfortable not offering anything).

Out of curiosity, do annual flu vaccines cost money in the US?

In Canada, the way those work is you just go to any pharmacy or most doctors offices. They'll take info from your health card, give you the shot (usually no wait, maybe 30 min at most if it's unusually busy), ask you to stick around for 15 minutes and then you can leave. No cost all and super convenient.

Yeah, I think that's a misconception that many Canadians have about privatization. Some people get the impression that the US must have no wait and that means private healthcare is better. But while they certainly do have less or a wait, it's not a difference that I think most people would consider worth it if they saw numbers. There's diminishing returns. The difference between getting a surgery tomorrow or in one month is huge. But getting it in 8 months instead of 10 months isn't so big.

I'm sure if you have enough money, you could get any kind of healthcare in the US next day, but not for normal people prices.

I think proponents of privatization like to push this misconception because the idea of reduced wait is really the only thing they have going for them and they're happy to reap the benefits of misconceptions.

I think it'd be so much better. Though the difficulty with getting to that point is that it's not merely underfunded because of intertia or something. In a few provinces (particularly my own of Ontario), the conservative government seems to actively want to cut costs and privatize.

Finding a GP is the worst part of it. My experience with emergencies and a hearing loss has been fantastic. I felt my wait time for emergencies has been reasonable for the symptoms I was having. I had appendicitis as a kid and the health care was as top notch as can be for what's quite a miserable experience for a kid.

I have a cochlear implant and my experience in getting audiologist appointments has been again perfectly reasonable. Most appointments are just routine and could wait a few months. Once I had broken equipment and was able to get a same day appointment. The province paid for everything while I was a kid (countless tests and multiple hearing aids), paid for the cochlear implant surgery, and covered most of the costs of the processor (not really sure why that part isn't 100%).

The best part is not a single one of these has cost any money besides time off work and transportation. I've seen what some Americans pay. I probably would have been at least 50k in debt if I were an uninsured American.

The GP thing, though... it took me 6 months when I moved to Ontario just to get through waitlists, after taking time to sign up for every clinic waitlist I could. My then-partner later tried out the government run program for finding a GP and was not exactly amused by the fact that it never found a doctor even 3 years later when she gave up on it. She just used walk in clinics and referrals from those.

Lol yeah. My cat will never let me forget to feed her. But I've killed so many plants. If I'm late with feeding my cat, I feel really bad about it. When the plants die because I thought I'd give gardening another go, I kinda just... don't feel anything.

Uber does have a carpool option. But I'm not sure how often it gets used.

The fact that there is an organization of the same name does not mean they own the slogan. People using the slogan almost never do so in reference to this organization nor are necessarily even aware that such an organization exists.

BLM is more of a human rights statement. Anything is "political" if the right choses to whine about it. An example is putting pronouns on name tags. It's a great idea to ensure employees are addressed correctly and frankly shouldn't be any more political than a name tag containing your name, but the right choses to view them as political because they need a constant culture war.

To be fair, that's effectively passed, isn't it? This isn't the kind of bill where we'd expect a veto, so getting passed in the house and senate is practically all the work.

It has what appears to be Patrick Bateman and Homelander, who are both utterly blatant psychopaths. I'm not sure which Cillian Murphy character is pictured, but the Keeanu Reeves one appears to be John Wick, an assassin who kills about every other person in New York from the movies I've seen (they don't really have a plot beyond "apparently every single person is an assassin").

So really the only options are satire or literally the dumbest thing ever created.

They're far more powerful than a street gang. Street gangs are generally universally loathed by the general public and the courts are reasonably happy to lock up gangsters (though do tend to turn a blind eye when gang violence is self contained).

By comparison, the police have this significant chunk of the population bizarrely supporting them ("back the blue" and "thin Blue line"), a massive amount of media propaganda (it feels like every other show on TV is a cop drama), and the courts are heavily on their side (regularly refusing to even bring cases against the police).

I've never seen street gangs have any of those things. Even when there's media about gangs, it usually doesn't shy away from being clear that the gangs are evil.

I agree they can be useful (I've found intelligent code snippet autocompletion to be great), but it's really important that the humans using the tool are very skilled and aware of the limitations of AI.

Eg, my usage generates only very, very small amounts of code (usually a few lines). I have to very carefully read those lines to make sure they are correct. It's never generating something innovative. It simply guesses what I was going to type anyways. So it only saved me time spent typing and the AI is by no means in charge of logic. It also is wrong a lot of the time. Anyone who lets AI generate a substantial amount of code or lets it generate code you don't understand thoroughly is both a fool and a danger.

It does save me time, especially on boilerplate and common constructs, but it's certainly not revolutionary and it's far too inaccurate to do the kinds of things non programmers tend to think AI can do.

He was kicked out of EA. Even EA isn't this bad lol. Seriously, while EA has had some controversies with nickle and diming, have they ever retroactively started making things cost money?

Arbitration is often a good thing, by avoiding clogging up courts and arbitrators can sometimes be better than whatever judge you'd get (since both parties have to agree to the arbitrator). It's still legally binding and arbitrators have made lots of great rulings.

But not as a replacement for class action. The whole point of class actions is to make it much more viable for many people to be represented because only one affected person has to deal with managing an expensive lawsuit and there's just one case instead of hundreds of thousands of arbitration cases (which still cost a ton of money for lawyers). So IMO arbitration is great, but shouldn't be allowed to replace class actions specifically.

Migrating really large software is incredibly time consuming and difficult. My background is with backend servers, not games, but some large framework migrations we've done were a multi year effort and IMO they weren't nearly as big or fundamental as game engines can be (though we did have to maintain near perfect uptime, which isn't a concern for an unreleased game).

I'm no expert on the US Constitution, but I was under the impression that the second amendment basically lets you have guns (well, something something well regulated militia, but that part is universally ignored by now). It doesn't say you're allowed to carry in public. I know states already get to set carry laws, which is why some states are open vs concealed carry. I don't see how this is much different. It's not like they're even saying you can't have guns at your home.

I mean, some of them? Plenty of people who shoot others are first offenders. And I'm sure even many dangerous people wouldn't carry a gun around if the mere act of carrying could get you sent to jail. Carrying being legal means that you can blend into the crowd of law abiding people.

Nobody thinks every gun crime will be stopped with any single act of gun control. But they all reduce it.