2rafa
1d ago
The groypers/tankies/islamists would kill/expel/rape/torture/imprison me anyway, so I’m unclear as to why I owe them any empathy.
And I’m not defending her death. In fact, you can go back to 2020 when I was a comparative moderate (when compared to some regulars) on Floyd because I believed (and still do believe) that on balance, Chauvin’s hold was unreasonable - even if I don’t think he should have gone to jail, certainly not for the length of time he did, for it.
But the episode taught me one thing. If you give the left an inch, they take a mile. If you agree that a single cop did something dumb, you get the police defunded, a wave of ridiculous and damaging woke in the private and public sector, and the greatest crime wave in decades. So while I don’t defend this, I know the only thing for it is to say “OK, what about it?”, to give not one inch.
Yes, or at least he is failing to take the action he should and so allowing that ruin to happen. He should listen to Miller instead of the agricultural lobby.
“If you don’t have borders, you don’t have a country”
- Bernie Sanders (paraphrased)
When you stand against immigration enforcement you stand against the future of the entire civilization we share. You are saying that you want your descendants and mine to live in a dirtier, poorer, more squalid, more corrupt, more unequal, more violent country, forever.
That is treason no less severe than selling nuclear secrets to Russia or Iran, and perhaps moreso. Trump’s loss in 2020 was sealed the second he started showing sympathy to the Floyd rioters. He shouldn’t make that mistake again, and I’m glad that so far the administration is making a strong stand.
If you obstruct ICE in any capacity, why should I care what happens to you, when by your very action you are saying you don’t care about what happens to me?
2rafa
2d ago
This will get regulated eventually. It’s incoherent to apply an entirely different regime to ‘prediction market bets’ than to financial markets, especially when plenty of eg Polymarket markets proxy the regulated securities market (betting on recessions, corporate performance/product, fed policy) as exchanges and others have raised.
There is, like Sloot said, a long history of libertarians and some other people arguing that insider trading should be legal to allow for better price discovery / for market efficiency, that it should be limited only contractually (eg. between employee and employer).
But people instinctually don’t like the idea of insider trading, and so it doesn’t seem coherent to allow it only on Polymarket. The most liquid prediction markets also have a relatively large amount of federally-mandated KYC now, so investigation can’t be substantially harder than for other insider trading.
I think it will happen. Maybe not soon, but eventually. That said, people do get away with insider trading most of the time. There were substantial moves in Israeli securities, in oil, in defense before October 7 for example, presumably because a lot of people knew and those people talked.
2rafa
4d ago
I think it would be reasonable to say “I don’t want to spend 3 hours a day with my kids”. (By the way, the same courtesy should be extended to women who think this, which is a lot of them.)
10 minutes is pretty low though, it’s a way of relatively directly saying that you only had kids to have kids (whether for religious, legacy, accidental or other reasons, or some combination of the above) and don’t really care about them independently of that. Which is OK, but maybe less socially acceptable now.
I was largely raised by nannies until I was old enough to go to school (and I guess the person is talking about preschool aged kids). I have no resentment toward my parents; I had dinner with them most nights from maybe 4 or 5 years old and I spent most vacations with them except for camp in the summer, and that wasn’t all summer anyway. They were loving and nurturing and I still have a strong relationship with them. My mom would take me to the doctor, my dad would read to us at night, both parents always made time to meet the teachers a couple of times a year. That seems reasonable to me.
I don’t know that 10 minutes would.
2rafa
5d ago
If the US is fine with Rodriguez why would anyone expect new elections to be free or fair? If she’s amenable to Trump’s demands then he has no interest in making a big deal of another questionable election result.
2rafa
5d ago
So, from reading the mainstream press this morning (allegedly with sources) the plan now is that Maduro’s deputy (a loyal chavista figure obviously) is in charge, and nothing changes except that the government becomes friendlier to the US state and oil interests? I guess that counts as a win given this was a cheap and successful operation militarily, but for the long suffering Venezuelan people it doesn’t seem to offer much in the way of hope.
2rafa
5d ago
how much damage could a reasonably-competent solitary actor — “a lone man with a grudge against the world,” to quote @Edawayac_Tosscount — pull off in a single “attack”?
Very easy for this discussion to become a Tom Clancy (ghost)writer’s room meeting, but I suspect that in this case the “best” (worst for humanity) option given current technology (e.g., we are probably not yet in the place where a lone actor can use AI and a home lab to synthesize a virus that can kill billions, because I have a strong fear that at that point it will happen) would be to spend time infiltrating some large, possibly mundane, organization and becoming a figure who has operational control over some kind of system (which might not even be a very senior role) where oversight is minimal and a bad actor could deliberately cause catastrophic damage that would either result in a huge number of casualties or result in a smaller number of (or even just one, critical) VIP casualties.
I also remember reading somewhere that nuclear submarine captains have the absolute authority to order nuclear strikes in a dead hand scenario, so maybe that.
2rafa
6d ago
Because since at least 1991 the US has been technically and geopolitically capable of invading Cuba and overthrowing the communists there without provoking a global crisis and hasn’t done so.
2rafa
6d ago
If you’re Maduro and think you’re going to be deposed, that’s when you resign, leave the crown for the next guy, and sail off into comfortable exile in Russia / China / Cuba / Brazil etc. Agreeing to some elaborate scheme where you spend the rest of your life in jail seems like a bad idea.
2rafa
6d ago
or, on the other hand, it might be that the Mormons in the CIA are just vastly more competent than the rest of the government.
2rafa
6d ago
Maduro captured and in US custody. Absolutely unhinged but also, one has to say, immensely impressive move.
2rafa
6d ago
It’s more complex than that, Fuentes actually defended the Monroe doctrine and was ambivalent to sympathetic to attacking Venezuela a few months ago.
2rafa
6d ago
No, it’s different. Public school teachers are paid relatively averagely given years in the workforce and levels of education; a few make $130k but that’s a small minority in the highest paying districts in the country. They are paid toward the bottom of the most common ‘public service professions’ pay scale (cops, nurses, local government workers), especially in red states. In blue states, particularly rich ones in big cities with very high private sector salaries where the ‘we support underpaid teachers’ sentiment is most common they are paid slightly better, but so are the NYPD and nurses who work in Manhattan.
Meanwhile, while Americans have a lot of respect for doctors, I’ve never heard the sentiment that they’re underpaid except from doctors. They might say underpaid ‘compared to’ dislikes groups like CEOs and bankers, but that is more about the latter than the former. “No, I believe my anaesthesiologist should make $900k a year instead of $600k - hell why not a million?” just isn’t really the kind of thing people are saying or thinking.
2rafa
7d ago
That’s nothing new. The BMA (British Medical Association) was the most aggressive and chief lobbyist against the formation of the NHS in the 1940s. Doctors hate single payer because it drives down physician pay. That is precisely a reason to do it.
2rafa
7d ago
The US doesn’t really have a party system like other democracies. There is no Democratic or Republican Party as an actual organization with a Leader and a membership base that pays $100 a year to be a card-carrying Republican and a committee of leaders that picks all the candidates running for every seat. That’s in many ways a good thing, and the result of a popular vote based primary system with open party affiliation, but it also means that the parties are amorphous. Even the National Committees are weird quasi-governmental service operations that manage conventions and assist with fundraising and advertising, they’re not leadership bodies the same way most other countries’ political parties have them, and their managers are neither the leaders of the movement nor have any actual political power if the ‘party’ has a majority in both chambers and/or the presidency.
That context explains why grassroots politics in the US is mostly driven by organizations dedicated to specific policy goals like Pro Life or Pro Choice or anti-ICE or PETA or the NIMBYs or the YIMBYs by whatever name. Around election time huge PAC funding allows paid organizers to fund both volunteered and paid campaigns that operate the way that canvassers to in more traditional party systems, but the ‘social club’ style party all year, every year, is less of an American thing.
When it's single payer it's not really negotiating any more. It's lobbying... and corruption.
If I’m an American citizen (only) and want to become a diplomat or a military submarine captain or a central banker, I pretty much have to work for the government. Making it so that if you want to be a doctor, you (mostly) have to work for the government is no different.
The common pattern with such monopolies is the union or association negotiates not with the government itself but the politicians.
The politicians in single payer systems often stand up against paying doctors more because they know that if they do they have to pay all public sector workers more, and that means their own fiscal priorities often become unaffordable. The incentives aren’t perfect but they’re better than the current system where responsibility is diffused.
This won't occur with things like drug development because those companies are very unpopular; they can offer money but won't have enough to offer in terms of votes compared to the populist who says he's going to fix the prices of new drugs.
There are ways around it. The big drug makers have forced the UK to pay more by threatening to move well-paid pharma jobs offshore for example. Governments fund tens of billions of dollars in medical research, private universities do too. I’m unconvinced there will some collapse in new drug development if single payer happens, the global system might just become more fair instead of the American taxpayer paying for a disproportionate share of medical innovation.
2rafa
7d ago
I just don’t think this applies to a lot of historic conflict since the advent of civilization. When you’re an man in some European country some time in the last thousand years and one year the King and his council decide that you’re at war with this random other European country because of competition over control for the Caribbean or something happening in the Spanish Netherlands (you’ve never met anyone from there) and then thirty years later the next king decides that actually you’re now allies with the people you fought against and your son needs to go off and fight the people you were allies with, this isn’t some deeply visceral intertribal conflict against blood enemies. This is politics. Until the modern period most people didn’t even have what we’d call a modern, nationalist conception of the state or loyalty to it.
For 200 years, immigrant groups have plundered America, destroying everything the Anglo Saxon founding fathers have created. That much is obviously and entirely true. But it also left the descendants of the Irish who destroyed the peaceful, English eastern seaboard, the New England of gentlemen’s clubs and old Boston, long forgotten, the ‘swarthy’ Scandinavians (according to Ben Franklin who settled the Midwest, the Italians and Poles and whoever else poorly placed to frame their own civilizational conflict against later groups of migrants.
2rafa
7d ago
Single payer has a very ugly aspect to it that you see when you are exposed to it a lot. There's a good book written by an Indian about it in England (forget the name). I've seen people come to ER and get a bed because their wife was in. Complain of some general stomach pain. Unable to elicit any signs. Probably the current system has this as well. It's just a very ugly thing when you make something free for common good and the underclass abuse it in ways that make you want to put them on the moon.
Sure, although as mentioned, the underclass already have this in the US since they don’t pay for anything. If anything, the extreme bed pressure on the NHS means they’re more likely to turn away someone with no medical issues who just wants a bed.
For normal hypochondriacs and elderly people with nothing better to do but some money, implementing an ER fee is still completely possible in a single payer system (it’s just that England doesn’t have one). It would not affect the true underclass but would affect a lot of abuse which is by people who have some money but just nothing better to do.
2rafa
7d ago
One option could be to have a ‘premium’ package on a critical care / serious illness model for working age people where they get access to priority care, better hospitals and treatment if, say, aged 18 to 65 and seriously ill, and then a standard package for people above and below that age paid for by the state.
2rafa
7d ago
Surely these programs have net worth caps far too low to be able to generate $7k a year. I looked it up and some seem to have a primary home exemption, but securities I doubt are included.
Single payer makes sense
Relative to GDP and median income, British doctors and nurses are paid like shit. This is objectively good for the taxpayer and user of healthcare services. The NHS is worse than the US system, but this is likely more because Britain is much poorer than America than that it spends a much lower proportion of GDP on healthcare (both are true). The fact that it works at all, most of the time, is kind of great. US annual healthcare spending per capita is 300%, in dollar terms, of UK annual healthcare spending. The British spend $5000 per year per capita, the Americans spend $15,000. There is no major difference in life expectancy. A few niche cancers have higher mortality in Britain, but for most people, most of the time, the outcome difference is marginal and reflects a comparatively lower economic baseline and therefore budget than it does some inherent problem with single payer.
In addition, British doctors can emigrate to places that pay more, whereas the US under a single payer system would probably still have the highest medicine pay of any major country, it just wouldn’t be so much higher because one central employer could negotiate centrally (not just for pay, of course, but also for things like drug costs where the Brits pay far less for the same drugs than Americans do). I’ve been to the ER here on a couple of occasions, in both it was no worse than the US equivalent. If an American doctor currently making $600k had their pay cut to $300k, there’s still pretty much no other Western country they could move to where they would be paid much more, even in Australia most doctors don’t make that (450k AUD) and Australia isn’t big enough to absorb that demand anyway.
Every American who has ever used (or been forced to use) an anaesthesiologist making $600k is a pay pig for the AMA cartel. You can take the top 10% of nurse practitioners by IQ and train them to do this in a year. Even nurses make like $150k now in a lot of places. And the entire insurance system is a middleman grift, with zero incentives (due to both the nature of the business, the pricing power of hospital systems and doctors, and bad legislation) to rein in costs. Everything just gets passed on with an extra cut until ultimately the taxpayer foots a big proportion of the bill. In the American system, the solution is always increasing prices because that is all that can happen.
Three intertwined factors explain American healthcare costs, none of which have anything to do with great care. Extremely high physician salaries, high drug prices, and the entire bureaucratic insurance apparatus.
The first issue is part of a problem you also see in other professions like accounting and law, although medicine is by far the most egregious case, which you could call something like “professional capture”. In this case, a profession dominated by moderately intelligent people (say 2 standard deviations above the average) runs circles around legislators, regulators, administrators and others around the median to its advantage. In a single payer system where say 90% of hospitals are owned by the government, the government decides how much doctors get paid. You can do some private work for the super rich on the side, but outside of specialties like plastic surgery that isn’t going to pay the bills. Otherwise, you take the pay the state gives you, or you go somewhere else (which, as discussed, wouldn’t be an option for all but a tiny minority of American doctors). Since medicine is so overpaid relative to most other PMC professions, halving doctor pay like this would bring down costs by perhaps 5% with no disadvantage (even at half pay the average doctor would still make more than the average accountant or lawyer).
The second problem is a reality of the insurance and network system. For experimental/research treatments, patients can whine and complain about experimental therapies not covered, which generates bad press for the insurers, which forces them to cover some horrific experimental procedure that costs $10m and prolongs little Timmy’s life by 2 additional horrific months. In the UK, when this topic comes up at the water cooler, most people will defend the NHS’ QALY system because they rightfully understand the direct relationship between their tax money and this kind of bullshit waste. In America, where the consumer is distanced from this spending, far more people will argue that insurers are “greedy” whenever they don’t spend “whatever it takes”. Instead of seeing themselves as the losers, they see Big Business as the loser, because the average person cannot grasp even the most banal plumbing of the economic system. For mainstream treatments, big pharma has leverage over providers and insurers who are often local, and so can’t drive down prices. If you don’t sell to the NHS, you aren’t going to sell your drug in England (outside, again, of perhaps a handful of tiny private hospitals in London). In America, you don’t face that stark choice; there is no pressure to negotiate, and of course even Biden’s lifting of the prohibition on Medicare (the only entity large enough) negotiating drug prices seems to be being heavily diluted.
The inherent reality of insurance as applied to healthcare doesn’t make sense. Most people’s houses never burn to the ground. Most mail is never lost. Most people don’t die before they retire. Most ships don’t sink. Insurance works in these cases to pool risk. If every ship sinks some of the time, if everyone’s house burns down a few times in their life, insurance is bad model for handling these inevitabilities - a communal (eg church, guild, industry, whatever) or state-based scheme is economically preferable. The insurance bureaucracy (which extends far beyond the insurers themselves) has already been covered elsewhere, but a combination of the model’s inherent weaknesses and terrible regulation is responsible for significant upward pressure on all healthcare costs. Margins don’t have to be high (and they aren’t) for this to be the case, the process just needs to be labor and other cost intensive (and it is). In fact, with margins strictly limited, profitability is driven only by higher total insurer revenue, again incentivizing higher prices without any incentives for productivity growth.
As I’ve argued here before, if you are a middle class or above taxpayer in America, you should be fighting for single payer. Why? Because the dregs, the scum, the homeless, the degenerates, the old and sick who never contributed much, the welfare queens and trailer trash and lifelong can-never-works already get free single payer at the point of use and forever. They already have this. Only you, the pay pig, has to pay, get into medical debt, deal with endless bureaucracy. The homeless guy who ODs again or has some horrific needle induced injury walks in, gets his free stay under whatever name he chooses, costs YOU your share of the $150,000 bill (after all, the doctors and nurses and drug companies still get paid all the same) and leaves. No consequence.
Since the American people are too taken by pathological empathy to do something about that (does this make healthcare the ultimate example of anarcho-tyranny?), you may as well at least get the same deal for yourself.
If Trump really wants it he can make a deal (under threat of sanctions or impossibly high tariffs on Danish exports) with Denmark to offer a referendum with three options:
My guess is that in this scenario the overwhelmingly Inuit population which has some of the highest rates of alcoholism and suicide in the world will vote for option 3, or a modified option 2 with the explicit promise of an economic suzerainty relationship that is essentially 3 in all but name.
This referendum would conform to both EU and UN guidance on the rights of indigenous peoples and self-determination blah blah blah.
However it would probably also require Congress, and they are both uninterested and know that Trump gains and loses interest in this topic regularly.
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