psivchaz @ psivchaz @reddthat.com

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2 yr. ago

That's the neat part: Convicted felons ARE excluded from most public service jobs like being a teacher or a mayor. It was widely believed that this included the presidency until the Supreme Court decided it somehow didn't.

I love the other comments you made, but I want to point out one other thing: How did those privileges come about? That is, what were the conditions that led to the government taking the power to grant companies de facto monopolies?

In some cases, it was an unintended consequence of political conditions. For example, private insurers came to rule our healthcare system because of a cap on income to raise funds for WW2. In order to get around this cap, employers offered non-cash benefits and the rest is history. Libertarians love this one, it's pretty cut and dry that a form of socialism shot itself in the foot.

However, there are many other cases where it was an unintended consequence of regulation written in blood. An easy and popular example is the FDA. Making food and adhering to food regulations at scale is definitely something that requires so much up front capital that it has been favoring existing corporations for quite a while, leading to a relatively small number of companies controlling a huge portion of the food supply. But that regulation came about because companies large and small, unfettered and unrestricted, were adulterating the food or cutting dangerous corners to maximize profit. The solution can't just be less regulation, those same companies will continue to dominate but now with the ability to outright feed us poison while buying or otherwise destroying any competition.

This has happened before. GUI tools were going to mean less developers with less cost, but it didn't materialize. Higher level languages were going to cause mass layoffs but it didn't really materialize. Tools like WordPress were going to put web developers out of business, but it didn't really. Sitebuilders like Wix were going to do it, too, but they really haven't.

These tools perform well at the starter end, but terribly at the larger or enterprise end. Current AI is like that. It can help better than I think people on here give it credit for, but it can't replace. At best, it simply produces things with bugs, or that doesn't quite work. At worst, it appears to work but is riddled with problems.

I genuinely believe AI isn't over hyped in the long run. We're going to need solutions to fix our current way of work. But I feel confident it's still further away than the people investing in it think it is, and they're going to be paying big for that mistake.

TBH, if insurance companies started pushing for climate change policies it would probably make those policies less popular. If there's an industry less trusted than Big Oil, it's Insurance.

One time I was at a restaurant and I noted that it didn't have a changing station. Sure enough, during the meal my kid needed to be changed. I asked my wife if her restroom had a changing station, and she told me it did.

So I took my kid up to the host stand and asked to talk to the manager. I politely explained that I needed to change a diaper but there wasn't a changing station in the restroom so asked which table I could use, or if I should just use the bench in the waiting area. Manager got flustered and had a waitress check if the women's room was empty and then stood outside the door while I changed the diaper.

About a year later I happened to go back, and I did notice that the men's room had a changing table. It's a small thing, but I felt like I won one.

You'd be dismayed to find out how often I've seen people do that.

What on Earth are you talking about? Someone posted a thing above that shows Tesla at #3 in profits.That's pretty big. The dude sucks, and he's openly tossing money around trying to influence elections, and he is a known liar and fraud. The company is way overvalued. You don't have to exaggerate and say Tesla fails at selling cars to criticize him.

It's more odd to me that the ones who believe in original sin and forgiveness for everything are the ones anti-abortion and pro-execution.

The thing that gets me is that it's true. It's a patchwork... of so many people taking more than they should and giving less than they should. If UHC tomorrow used every penny of the premiums they charge purely to cover healthcare, they still wouldn't fix the problem. A fix would require change to the pharmacies, the drug companies, the medical equipment companies, the hospitals and hospital networks, and more levels of bullshit middlemen than I even know exist. No single person, be they President or CEO or billionaire, can fix it.

He is still an asshole though. He is just pointing to the problem and saying "Good people are trying to fix it." Are they? Where's the evidence? I would love to read an article that made me think, "Yes, the healthcare industry is making one small step in the right direction" but it hasn't come up. If this dude wants me to sympathize with him or with Brian Thompson, he should say ONE THING that either of them has ever done to address the problems of the industry and make things genuinely better for everyone. My money is that he can't.

It's been a long time but I recall a study featured on Freakonomics where a national park tried different signs to get people to not steal rocks. Signs like, "Taking rocks hurts the ecosystem" and "Taking rocks is a crime."

The only effective one was something along the lines of, "A million people visit this park every year and leave things alone." Suggesting that telling people to do the right thing is less effective than peer pressure.

I don't know the full history of corporate shenanigans, but it's my understanding that the beginning of it all was to help form businesses that no individual could afford to start. No single person should reasonably have the funds to build a factory with all of the expensive equipment and parts needed to make cell phones. So you get people together who think cell phones are a good idea, they all pitch in, and now you can afford to build it and they get to share in the profits when it succeeds.

I like the employee-owned idea, but it seems like it would be hard to get off the ground in industries that require huge upfront investments. Imagine you want to build a grocery store, but the land and the building and the initial stock all takes money so you have to ask the cashier for $10,000 up front before you can actually build the thing and later start paying them. I legitimately don't know, are there proposed ways to build these businesses but make them employee-owned?

I always got hung up on that too. It seems to me that the ideal state would be you invest in a company, they make a profit, you get a share of that profit. You can reinvest that in other places, helping more people start their businesses, helping more people find employment and get things done. It's like economic democracy in action, where people get to decide what businesses are needed through investment. No person on Earth should have the funds to just build a chip fabrication plant, as an example, so crowd sourcing the funding like this makes perfect sense to me.

Where it falls down is in short term greed. I don't think that the system was intended or can reasonably sustain all the high-speed trading trying to maximize returns not by helping the company succeed but by leeching off of the investment of others. What should have been a way for people to help build things has become a way for a whole industry to extract more money out of the world.

It's way more professional than I could manage under the circumstances.

You can't take motive for granted. I would be willing to bet that police are operating under the assumption that it's related to his job. But you can't just rule out a personal grudge or something else. The writing on the bullets could just as easily be a distraction. It's probably not, but it could.

I knew healthcare was messed up but I legit didn't know how messed up until it happened to me. My daughter got put on a specialty medicine because of a relatively rare kidney condition. It had to be compounded, because she is a small child but the medicine only came in adult doses.

Aetna denied coverage, stating I had to get the medicine from CVS (which is owned by the same parent company of Aetna). CVS does not compound medicine, so we couldn't get it from them. I spent almost a full year on the phone arguing with them and around $6000 paying out of pocket before I was able to switch insurances.

I consider myself reasonable. Even in a functioning system, mistakes can happen and need to be resolved, and I spent the first month or more assuming this was just an innocent mistake. What got to me was the total lack of recourse. Day after day on the phone with people, some of whom genuinely seemed to care but could do nothing. They intentionally separate the patients from the people making decisions so that all the decision makers get is a few fields in a form, not the whole story. The people in charge are even more separated so they never have to hear anything about the people they're screwing over. And if I couldn't afford the extra $6000 burden, I just wouldn't have gotten the medicine and in the best case she would have spent that year in and out of the hospital and in the worst she wouldn't have survived the year.

I tend to think most people are decent. But the system we've built makes sure to separate people by impenetrable layers of bureaucracy to ensure that the decent people either can't do anything or never know there's a problem, while the indecent never have to be confronted with the damage they do. It's insane.

I think about this sometimes but the challenges for direct democracy are very hard to overcome. To vote right now, you go to a place and someone verifies your identity and then you vote on a machine that should theoretically have not just your vote but some form of backup to ensure your vote is counted.

Obviously this would get really obnoxious if you were voting constantly. So something like change.org maybe where people can propose things and others can vote on them. But now how do we handle identity verification, and ensuring only one vote per person? On something connected to the Internet, how do we verify security? This needs to be even more secure than a bank, as every hacker and government in the world will want to sway the results.

We could maybe distribute something like a USB key to cryptographically ensure everyone's identity, but then you will need to handle people losing theirs, or theft, and it wouldn't work great with cell phones. There's other identity solutions like scanning documents or facial ID but they have their own security issues and also are a nightmare for privacy.

I dunno. There's probably a solution out there that might work, but it would take a lot of work to make it trustworthy and that work would largely be overseen by people the system is meant to replace so they aren't exactly incentivized to get it right.

I hate when people downplay the economy or employment as trivial or at least not very important. It is important, and for many it is rational to consider it the most important. At an individual level in America, employment means food, shelter, healthcare. It even means companionship... People who can't afford to date, have a harder time finding love.

At a high level, even if we implemented universal healthcare and fixed our other problems, the health of the economy would STILL dictate our access to food, shelter, and healthcare. A government with no funds cannot sustain programs.

Some of them, I assume, are good people.

I have a family member that doesn't get this (thankfully just the one). It's not that he voted for Trump, it's all the shit he says. The casual "haha jk" racism when I introduced him to a Hispanic friend of mine. The fact that he will loudly talk about some things specifically to upset or annoy people. The fact that he thinks politics is a team sport and Trump's win is a personal victory for him that somehow means he "beat" the rest of us.

I just picked a state. Average infant daycare cost is $1172/mo. Maximum of 4 infants per caregiver, so a maximum of $4.688.

Health insurance here averages $400/mo, for an individual (some often paid by the employer).

Assuming they are employed, the employer is paying for federal unemployment insurance, workers compensation insurance, state unemployment insurance. It was really hard to get solid numbers but based on my reading, we can estimate about 2% will go to that.

So we have $4296 left over. Assuming payroll and supplies and everything else costs nothing at all (which is definitely not accurate), and assuming we give the rest straight to the employee... Their gross would be $51,000 roughly.

The average daycare worker in this state makes about $33k/year.