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Cake day: December 6th, 2024

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  • Trauma my ass.

    Literally only a handful of people alive today in Israel experienced the Holocaust and most aren’t even descendents Western European Jews: their parents and grandparents came from Russia (especially people from the Settler Movement).

    Nah, this is the same kind of thieving and murdering white colonialism as in the US back when their were genociding the Native Tribes, Appartheid South Africa and the worst of the White occupiers in Africa (such as Belgium in Congo) - as can be seen by the way the Zionists treat Ethiopian Jews - which just happens to be associated with an unusual overwhelmingly white religion other than the usual overwhelmingly White religion.

    These people have the same kind of “Western Values” as early XX century Germany.






  • But people do stop believing money has value, or more specifically, their trust in the value of money can go down - you all over the History in plenty of places that people’s trust in the value of money can break down.

    As somebody pointed out, if one person has all the money and nobody else has money, money has no value, so it’s logical to expect that between were we are now and that imaginary extreme point there will be a balance in the distribution of wealth were most people do lose trust in the value of money and the “wealth” anchored on merelly that value stops being deemed wealth.

    (That said, the wealthy generally move their wealth into property - as the saying goes “Buy Land: they ain’t making any more of it” - but even that is backed by people’s belief and society’s enforcement of property laws and the mega-wealthy wouldn’t be so if they had to actually protect themselves their “rights” on all that they own: the limits to wealth, when anchored down to concrete physical things that the “owners” have to defend are far far lower that the current limits on wealth based on nation-backed tokens of value and ownership)


  • And further on point 2, the limit would determined by all that people can produce as well as, on the minus side, the costs of keeping those people alive and producing.

    As it so happens, people will produce more under better conditions, so spending the least amount possible keeping those people alive doesn’t yield maximum profit - there is a sweet spot somewhere in the curve were the people’s productivity minus the costs of keeping them productive is at a peak - i.e. profit is maximum - and that’s not at the point were the people producing things are merelly surviving.

    Capitalism really is just a way of the elites trying to get society to that sweet spot of that curve - under Capitalism people are more productive than in overtly autocratic systems (or even further, outright slavery) were less is spent on people, they get less education and they have less freedom to (from the point of view of the elites) waste their time doing what they want rather than produce, and because people in a Capitalist society live a bit better, are a bit less unhappy and have something to lose unlike in the outright autocratic systems, they produce more for the elites and there is less risk of rebelions so it all adds up to more profit for the elites.

    As you might have noticed by now, optimizing for the sweet spot of “productivity minus costs with the riff-raff” isn’t the same as optimizing for the greatest good for the greatest number (the basic principle of the Left) since most people by a huge margin are the “riff-raff”, not the elites.



  • Zionism is as much “Jews” as Nazism was blue-eyed blonde people: they’re both very similar ethno-Fascist extremely-racist ideologies which glue themselves to an ethnic group claiming to represent them even while plenty of members of that ethnic group very overtly say “They do not represent me”.

    Never believe Fascists when they claim to represent a nation (in the case of the traditional Fascists) or a race (in the case of the ethno-Fascists). In fact, the more general rules is “Never believe Fascists”.




  • Whilst that is indeed true for the population in general, politicians are a bunch of people self-selected on being the kind who wants power.

    That kind of personality is generally less trustworthy (and more on the sociopath side of the spectrum) than the general population.

    There’s actually a study published ages ago in the Harvard Business review about corporate CEOs (so, not politicians but in many ways similar) which found that the ones who got the job not because they sought it but because of other reasons (for example, the CEO died and they were the next in line) actually performed better (as measured by the performance of the companies they led compared to the rest of their industry) than CEOs who had sought that position and, even more interestingly, the most self-celebrating showoff CEOs were the worst performing of all (from my own participation with politics I would say those would be the closest in personality to top politicians).

    Further, there are various pretty old sayings (back from the time of the Ancient Greeks and the Romans) about the best person to get a leadership position being the one who doesn’t want a leadership position.

    So I would say that most politicians in parties with higher chances of getting power (so, in most countries, the two largest parties) are crooked (not specifically corruption - such as getting money to pass certain laws of using certain companies for government contracts - but more generally using power, privileged information, influence and connections to benefit themselves even to the detriment of those who voted for them: a good example of crookedness but not corruption is how some US Congressmen use insider information they get in some Congressional Committees to profit in stock market trading).



  • Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.comtoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.worldohh ...
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    10 days ago

    The UK NHI doesn’t work well because the neoliberal parties in successive governments (both the Tories and New Labour) have been defunding it so that they can - like Thatcher did with the railways - once its quality has fallen due to lack of funds claim that it’s bad because of Public management whilst it would be much better if it was Private because the Private Sector is much more competent, and privatise it.

    Just like the US has fatcats that are perfectly happy to mass murder people for personal profit, so does the UK (and the British Political System is almost as bad as the American, so it’s definitelly sold to the highest bidder) and plenty of those jhave wet dreams of the country having 13% of its GDP flowing through a Private Healthcare sector like the US were they can make billions of pounds doing exactly the same as the fatcats do in US Healthcare.

    Source: I lived in Britain for over a decade.

    By the way, you “read that the UK NHI doesn’t work very well” is exactly because the UK media is overwhelmingly owned by tax avoiding billionaires who are part of the above mentioned fatcats who see themselves as profiting massivelly from Britain having a Healthcare System like the US. It’s not by chance that the level of trust of Britons in their Press is one of the lowest in Europe.

    The exact same kind of tactics were deployed by Tatcher back when she wanted to privatise the Railways with the result that satisfaction with the Railway system in the UK is now even lower than when there was a public operator even after Thatcher defunded it to claim “Public is Bad, Private is Good” to amass enough public support to privatise it.


  • Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.comtoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.worldohh ...
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    10 days ago

    From what I’ve seen, treatments not being covered are only the case were those treatments are very expensive and there are other effective treatments (though less effective) which are much cheaper.

    There’s also often a delay between a new and very expensive experimental treatment coming out and it becoming covered because it won’t be covered if it doesn’t demonstrate that it’s advantages over the other available treatments are sufficient to justify the additional cost.

    Mind you, I’m talking about Public Healthcare Systems, not the so-called Mixed Systems that have mandatory Health Insurance (usually highly regulated and with a Public Insurance option for the less well off) - Mixed Systems have some of the same problems as the US System at least in my experience living in countries with one and with the other kind of system.


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    10 days ago

    I’m talking about Universal Health Care systems (for clarity: totally free healthcare for residents in that country), not Public Health Insurance systems.

    Europe is unfortunatelly also riddled with the latter system and having lived in countries with one kind and countries with the other, they’re quite different and the system with Insurance is invariably worse in terms of denials of coverage as well as cost (also because nowadays they all have laws that force every resident to have health insurance, which as result is more costlier than before those laws - as I saw first hand when I lived in a country with such a system when such a law came into effect), whilst UHC tends to have longer waiting lists (think 1 or 2 years of wait for some cirurgical procedures).

    Absolutelly, some of the absurdities of the US system are also present in the so-called “Mixed” Systems (i.e. the ones with healtcare insurance but more regulated and with a public option for some) and if you look at the kinds of governments in those countries for the last 3 decades, you’ll notice they’ve been invariably neoliberal mainstream parties (setting up such systems is part of the broader tendency in Europe to privatise just about everything that has been going on since the 80s and was copied from the US).

    IMHO, except for the long waiting times, the problems with Healthcare systems in part of Europe are the result of them having been transformed to become more like the US system in the last 3 decades.



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    10 days ago

    In several countries the mainstream party politicians (who are Neoliberals) have been slowly privatising healthcare by forcing the Public Healthcare System to outsource more and more of the work to the Private Sector and using the same technique as Thatcher in the UK used to privatise railroads (of which now, decades later, you can see the horrible results) - defund the Public Service and when the quality falls because of it claim that the Public Sector is always incompetent and the the Private is always competent so that’s why that Public Service had problems hence it needs to be privatised to improve.

    On top of that there is the actual genuine problem (rather than artificial meddling with the Public Healthcare System to send more money into the hands of politician’s mates) that populations are aging and older people require much more Healthcare Services in average.


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    I’ve lived in a couple of countries in Europe and some have Universal Healthcare systems (such as the UK and Portugal) but others such as The Netherlands and Germany have Mixed Systems with Health Insurance but highly regulated and were some people can get Health Insurance from the state.

    You’re not going to go bankrupt from the treatment or get treatment denied in countries with UHC.

    However if you lose your job or never find a job in the first place due to illness related issues or disabilities you’ll almost certainly end up on benefits which again can be better or worse depending in the country.

    I would say things have been getting worse all over Europe (personally I think it’s exactly because there’s been too much copying of shit from the US), especially when it comes to the level of benefits for poor people being sufficient (the house prices bubbles all over the place and the lack of building of social housing have made this a massive problem in most countries), but that’s not the same as simply going bankrupt from medical bills because you’ve had an accident, ended up in an emergency ward and got a life saving surgery.