GrymEdm @ GrymEdm @lemmy.world

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Joined

1 yr. ago

Possible translation: "Wings don't matter" - the only type of dinosaur (avian) to survive to present day.

Dictionary.com - terrorism: "the unlawful use of violence or threats to intimidate or coerce a civilian population or government, with the goal of furthering political, social, or ideological objectives." I think that's very fitting, hopefully the law will as well.

Dumb and desperate enough to believe the lies, meek enough to go with the flow, or corrupt enough to perpetuate the lies in hopes of wealth and power - 2024's Republican Party. The conservatives who don't fit one of those three templates either left long ago or are in the process of leaving following the primaries.

Josh Paul, a senior State Department official (Director) resigned just a few weeks into the war and here's his interview with CNN. He says he resigned over "unscrutinized arms transfers to Israel" saying that it would only lead to harm for both Palestinians and Israelis and wasn't in the long-term interests of America. Another article writes, "In his 11 years at the bureau, Paul said, he had “made more moral compromises than I can recall”.

“I knew [the role] was not without its moral complexity and moral compromises, and I made myself a promise that I would stay for as long as I felt the harm I might do could be outweighed by the good I could do,” he wrote. “I am leaving today because I believe that in our current course with regards to the continued – indeed, expanded and expedited – provision of lethal arms to Israel, I have reached the end of that bargain.”

Here's a CNN interview from almost 5 months ago (Nov. 6th) with a Doctors Without Borders US Nurse "who gives a harrowing description of what she witnessed in Gaza as she was attempting to get out of the area." In that news piece the UN Secretary General is quoted as saying that Gaza is becoming "a graveyard for children", which proved prophetic. Medical professionals have been talking about the horrific violence affecting children and other civilians since just a few weeks into the war.

None of this is new information. Israel broke the rules of war regarding collective punishment and avoiding civilian casualties immediately. In the first month they dropped hundreds of 2000lb bombs capable of killing people over 1,000 feet away. The USA dropped a 2000lb only ONCE during their years of fighting ISIS. The world's leaders have known how terrible this was for half a year now. They've simply chosen to look the other way or in many cases fully support it.

He should show his support in a real, material way, like paying their legal fees. It's the least he could do to support such "heroic" citizens right? Aww who am I kidding? Trump doesn't even pay Trump's legal fees. Words are cheap and the only time Trump isn't cheap is when he's an expensive mistake.

Is anyone else annoyed by the advice that young people should give up hope of paying their own mortgage for their own home in favor of paying their landlord's mortgage via rent? "People need to shift the idea that to be successful you have to own a home. It’s just not going to be in the cards for some people, and they’re in a worse position for trying to own a house,” she said."

I say that instead of telling young people to give up on goals we should, as a nation, protect owning a home as if it was a basic necessity and do something about large %'s of homes/condos being owned by investors. It was possible to buy a home on a single income just a few generations ago. I'm sure it can be again if we make housing security a priority.

Mozart also composed a musical piece that translates to "Lick me in the arse". The text rediscovered in 1991 consists of variations of the phrase "Lick me in the arse...quickly!" over and over. I just wanted to share that given the forum's name.

That's brutal because it's so fitting. Well played.

I guess I'll adjust my life goals to "hot cyberpunk partner in technological dystopia", because that sounds like some Bladerunner/Cyberpunk 2077 stuff.

I had not read anything like that but a quick search pulled up this story from last September by Wired that supports your post: FBI Agents Are Using Face Recognition Without Proper Training. "Yet only 5 percent of the 200 agents with access to the technology have taken the bureau’s three-day training course on how to use it, a report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) this month reveals." So it sounds like you're right, and also that they are probably inadequately trained even if they complete all 3 days on how to identify people with legal ramifications.

Israel is the type of control-heavy far-right state other dictators wish they could govern, and it's made possible by Western money and technology (I was going to name just the US but my country of Canada, among others, is not blameless either). This news also sucks because there's no way that tech is staying in Israel only. Citizens of the world better brace for convictions via AI facial recognition.

"Our computer model was able to reconstruct this image of the defendant nearly perfectly. It got the hands wrong and one eye is off-center, but otherwise that's clearly them committing the crime."

Even other Israelis hate settlers. If you want to read first-hand accounts about settler violence the amazing Jewish organization Breaking The Silence, dedicated to exposing the truth of Israeli behavior via verified veteran testimony, has many of them here. The settlers in Occupied Palestinian Territory are truly among the worst people of our time. If Israeli settlers approve of you it's probably time to reconsider the kind of person you are.

I totally agree. In another portion of this thread I talk about how unethical it is that healthcare professionals have to argue/plead with profit-motivated insurance companies to be allowed to properly care for their patients. For what it's worth, it may be that hybrid systems (public and private with universal guaranteed coverage) work best - e.g. Germany and Singapore. The very simplistic TL:DR is that private is allowed to exist as additions to universal public, but is regulated by the government and must make profit within the bounds of those regulations (as opposed to free market maximized profit). Everyone is guaranteed excellent care via very careful government intervention/standards. It's hard to get right, but can result in private efficiency at public prices.

This is the national version of "Police department investigates widespread claims of police brutality, finds police innocent." APAB.

The two-party system showed it's flaws well before this election. It forces voters to approve policies they don't support with their vote because they only get to pick from one of two "policy packages". It makes it easier to extend/enact harmful policies because if interest groups can purchase support from both parties they are immune to legislation that doesn't favor them. It divides the country into "us vs. them" because every election there is functionally only Dems vs. Republicans.

• Doctor salaries do not account for the 550 billion dollar pharma industry or the 1.7 trillion dollar health insurance industry. As a comparison, Canada's health industry is 112 billion USD. The USA's population is 8.4x greater, 8.4x112 billion = 940 billion instead of 1,700 billion (1.7 trillion).
• Canadian doctors earn 3rd most in the world, around 200k/year. US doctors earn about 117k more a year. There are just over a million doctors in the USA = about 117 billion dollars which brings the cost from 940 billion to 1.057 trillion instead of 1.7 trillion.
• I don't give a damn about GDP/consumption and have explained why in detail. You keep on saying the same thing, but you're not going to convince me that US healthcare should be more expensive to the tune of 700 billion/year because Americans buy more electronics, vehicles, etc. Especially given that wealth inequality means there's a huge variance in what people can afford.
• With regards to pharma, other developed nations pay less than 1/3rd for the same medicine, which nullifies any inherent cost argument. Americans pay much more for medicine just because of allowed corporate greed.
• I acknowledged that there's more to life expectancy than cost of healthcare, but we don't need to compare the UK to Thailand. We can compare the US to Canada, New Zealand, Germany, Japan, Korea, etc to see that it's more expensive and yet does not extend American life expectancy past that of cheaper countries. If you read my links, you'll see that the US has low doctors per capita, and high avoidable deaths per 100k when compared to peer nations - proof that Americans are not getting more for their money.
• In order for your point about heroic interventions etc. to be valid in a US vs. other developed nations argument, you'd have to prove that the other countries are not saving their citizens (otherwise it's a wash, with both groups saving seriously ill patients). Not only would the US have to be saving their citizens where others don't, but they'd have to be doing so in large enough quantities to skew national statistics.
• Even if experts agreed that the US system was great, I'd disagree because I can see the real-world end results. It's not ethical that doctors have to argue/plead with profit-motivated insurance accountants to properly treat their patient. It's not ethical when a seriously ill/wounded patient in a hospital is trying to figure out how they are going to deal with medical debt/bankruptcy that's going to leave them impoverished.
• However, I don't need to worry about that dilemma because experts are not fans of the US for-profit system. As I've provided several links to prove, both economists and medical professionals regularly publish criticisms of the USA's expensive, under-performing healthcare.

That is just restating the argument. There's nothing new in that response and I addressed the flaws of the idea that a richer country should = more expensive health care. It's not as if healthcare costs have some inherent reason to increase along with wealth. As an analogy, paying 50 dollars for electricity while earning 1k/month doesn't justify paying 5,000 for the same electricity usage while making 100k/month - it's 50 dollars' worth of electricity either way. Most glaringly, if healthcare is priced based on what the market will bear it excludes/punishes many folks by making care more expensive (as a %) the further down the ladder you are. It's the market model you'd expect for an optional product, not a life-defining essential.

US citizens aren't even getting "more" for the extra cost. The JAMA article I posted states that a) Americans utilize healthcare at largely the same rate as cheaper countries and b) the extra cost is primarily due to increased pricing of labor/goods and administrative expense. Expensive privatized healthcare resulting in huge amounts of medical debt is a solvable industry-created problem that the USA's peer countries have reduced or avoided entirely. If a Canadian and American live near the border, on average the Canadian pays half as much per year (link here again for convenience), is guaranteed coverage, and lives 3 years longer than the American a few kilometers away. While life expectancy is undeniably decided by multiple factors (certainly more than just healthcare quality), we can say for sure that Americans are not getting appreciably more frequent health care nor are they living longer than their neighbors for all that they pay double.

The only source I found for the graph you linked is some guy's anonymous blog post. I only skimmed the article because I'm not reading the MANY pages' worth of text from an unreviewed, unpublished source. I'm open to new ideas, but I want better sources. Harvard's School of Public Health tells me that US healthcare is the most expensive in the world and that's a problem. For a primary source, here's a study published in JAMA that concludes, "The United States spent approximately twice as much as other high-income countries on medical care, yet utilization rates in the United States were largely similar to those in other nations. Prices of labor and goods, including pharmaceuticals, and administrative costs appeared to be the major drivers of the difference in overall cost between the United States and other high-income countries." Similar utilization rates = people are not getting significantly "more" healthcare for their significantly more money.

I read some of that blog but gave up after a few minutes because I hate the premise - just because the US is rich does not make it ok that US healthcare is more expensive per capita and as a % of GDP. Given how critical healthcare is to quality/length of life, I believe it can only ethically be a guaranteed safety net - not an industry that excludes. It's not ok to charge people higher prices for a life-defining procedure that would be cheaper elsewhere for profit's sake and justify it by saying there are enough wealthy people to keep the system going.

Inserting for-profit insurance means companies charge what they can to be maximally profitable, which prices out the poor and leads to the problem we see where healthcare is almost a luxury. The free market means not everyone can afford luxury cars and that's ok, but it has no place in determining whether everyone can access to "luxury" healthcare. It also complicates health care at a detriment to patient wellbeing - a great example is doctors having to get approval for life-saving/improving procedures from a corporation motivated by wealth. I try not to be close-minded, but it's going to take far more for me to ignore criticisms from credible sources and the realities of medical bankruptcy or people scared to get an ambulance ride because of personal cost.

Frankie Boyle clip from Mock the Week about the worst person to be married to: "When I said I was a positive person, I meant HIV".