If it’s as bad as it is in the US, they ALL want to privatize it.

I’ll never forget Joe Lieberman swooping in and literally letting health insurance companies completely rewrite (destroy) the Affordable Care Act from an incremental step toward Single Payer into a law that codifies their profiteering. It put everyone into three categories:

A.) people who make more than their incredibly low income means testing are required to shop for expensive private health insurance on the free market. Health insurance companies literally raised their rates right after this. Because of Joe, health insurance profits, medical bankruptcy, and death from being under/uninsured (70,000 people per year) are at an all-time high! Any real illness won’t be covered and you’ll be forced to cover it with a GoFundMe!

B.) people who face stiff fines if they don’t have health insurance (neoliberal paternalism much like charging people for plastic bags and sugary drinks)

C.) people who somehow manage to sneak in under the means testing income bar! If you are 300% or more below the actual poverty line, you get the most bare bones medical insurance possible!

Thanks for pulling it out of me.

Kind vibes to you, friendly and intellectually honest fellow fediverse Lemmy user. 🙏

It was because I thought the author both understood and even agreed with my point in principle but then did intricate mental gymnastics to disagree with my point and let everyone off the hook including the person that I was disagreeing with.

I don’t want to continue talking in circles with Centrists telling me that the piss pouring on my head is in fact charitable rain drops from the benevolent libs.

I was thinking about that just now.

They did Corbyn dirty in almost exactly the same way that they did Sanders. It has been worst-case-scenario from there on out.

Have they fully privatized NHS yet?

That’s actually a bullshit talking point used by the Progressive Policy Institute (which are not even remotely Progressive) and other right wing think-tanks. They pushed right because of the DLC. They used the “capturing votes” thing to excuse the rightward push. They STILL love that talking point despite Bernie having the most bipartisan grassroots support in the last 40 years…

They had to move heaven and earth to cheat him.

Do you know that the Democratic Leadership Council was even worse because they were so ultimately SUCCESSFUL in pushing the DNC all the way to Reaganism since the 90’s that they dissolved in 2011 and their archives were added to the Clinton Foundation?

IMO, Clintonites and neoliberals were even more nefarious since they successfuly pretended to be leftists while purposely pushing the Democratic Party rightward to what we see today. Coupled with regulatory capture in the form of Citizens United, they now have a virtually-impenetrable corporatist stronghold in the US.

Further reading: https://www.salon.com/2016/04/30/clintonism_screwed_the_democrats_how_bill_hillary_and_the_democratic_leadership_council_gutted_progressivism/

Yup. The DNC should use that in an honest rebranding.

Equal rights for all (except the poor).

If that were the case, the Dems could just stand up and say, “You and I both know that those aren’t even issues. They are open and shut case of right vs. wrong. Here are the issues that actually matter to people on both sides of the political spectrum:

• stop sending our tax money to bomb people
• give us Single Payer
• break up monopolies
• make it possible to afford a home
• make college education free
• increase wages
• help labor
• etc”

and they would win in a landslide (if elections were even fair in the first place).

But they don’t because they know that it allows them to give the donors (who are considered PEOPLE with ability to funnel ANY amount of money to a candidate because of Citizens United) what they want (more money) while doing ANYTHING to distinguish themselves to their sheeplike electorate.

🤦🤦🏾‍♀️🤦🏻🤦🏽‍♀️🤦🏼‍♀️🤦🏿🤦🏾‍♀️🤦🏽‍♀️🤦🏽🤦🏿‍♀️🤦🏾‍♀️🤦🏽🤦🏽🤦🏾🤦🏽

First past the post. Here’s my go-to graphic to describe how it affects democracies.

I suspect the truth is a lot more jarring/disruptive to your worldview than you might be ready to admit. I’m positive that you’ll shoot the messenger. You’re so close to the answer. It’s staring you right in the face.

The unfortunate truth is: The people (tribe) that you’re (rabidly) in support of are merely using those identity politics dogwhistles so that you’ll continue voraciously gobbling up the increasingly miniscule table scraps from the ruling class while thinking to yourself that you’re the last bastion of resistance against some great encroaching evil. When conservatives accuse the DNC of running the media, they’re not wrong. The DNC and their stable of “diverse” demagogues are masters of stage-managed, focus-grouped mass marketing. If they tell the truth, they are quickly disposed of.

Please read some Chomsky, my friend.

Wedge issues.

Equal rights for

everyone

regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation and ethnicity are something that we, as a society, actually solved decades ago that aren’t even a question. They were brought back into public discourse by corrupt people that seek to keep us distracted while they rob us all blind. The two party system in the US (and any nation that uses a FPTP voting system that limits us to a MAXIMUM of two viable parties) is a HUGE reason why they still exist.

The reason we still argue endlessly about these solved issues is that the two parties are so similar in their other policies that they have decided to highlight those issues (as if there’s even a debate about them) because the two parties align in lockstep behind the other issues. The super wealthy people at the top don’t want us talking about things that will cause ALL of us to stand up and demand improvements to our material conditions so they have their demagogues loudly trumpet the absolutely miniscule differences between them and the conservative parties to whip their voters into a frenzy in support of voting against their best interest.

Then, I have to fight with unwitting dupes in the comment section that have fallen victim to the marketing gimmick that the black female version of Reagan is “fighting for good” despite her being politically aligned with Reagan on virtually every issue other than identity politics.

I’m calling the DNC technique of wrapping Reaganomics in a friendly identity politics outer shell “woke-washing” because of how similar it is to “green-washing”.

Chomsky proved this conclusively.

It was the CitiAssist.

It had to be a private student loan because my parents made slightly over the max to qualify to public loans even though they refused to pay for school. That left me with loans with insane interest rates. Most of what I had to borrow was to cover $150k to pay rent in the college town I lived in while attending school.

Then, Joe Biden wrote the bankruptcy protection bill, making it impossible for students to disburse their student loans in bankruptcy two years after I graduated. They also refused to allow me to consolidate 8 loans which all had monthly payments that were each intentionally calculated as if it was the only loan I had to pay. Then my loans got bought and moved around and are now owned by Trellis. There’s a lot more to it as well. Housing and healthcare plays a HUGE part.

TLDR; hyper-commodification of basic human needs like education, housing, healthcare, and food coupled with legislation that sentences those that can’t pay their feudal lord up front to a lifetime of serfdom. (Not to mention my union wages barely keeping pace with inflation).

I’d go rob the people that made my entire 20’s and 30’s into indentured student loan servitude for exactly the dollar figure they stole from me plus the insane interest that they tacked onto it because they owned politicians who eliminated all avenues that I could’ve used to get out of that contract.

The figure they stole from me: $197,355.49

Thanks for not putting blinders on. I was actually banned by hexbear for not being leftist enough but I still make it a point to seek out perspectives that differ from the censorship-happy tribalist hivemind on world. Communist leopards have yet to eat my face contrary to what the libs on world might have me believe. :)

No problem.

Thanks for proving mine as well.

I even ended up writing you a stupid term paper but you just couldn’t hang I guess.

I mean, I don’t need to do anything. As you implied, it’s similar to any currency. If no one holds it or accepts it, it doesn’t have value. The only reason the US dollar has any value is the military force behind it.

Thankfully, crypto is able to offer something back in exchange for leveraging the greater fool fallacy as a system of security. It actually DOES something that will be valuable to society someday (and let’s be real that day is not today since not one DApp has really gone mainstream…but when they do, you might not even know it).

It serves as a world computer that cannot be censored, stopped, or bent to the will of any one nation or world power and all people need to do is buy into that greater fool fallacy to sustain that illusion. It’s strange and I get your point. But luckily I don’t need to convince you. There are already enough fools greater than I to sustain this thing ad infinitum.

For example, how long do you think people are going to keep paying Fanduel and Draftkings their undeserving cut when a crypto-based alternative that is equal or even superior in every way pops up? It’s only a matter of time. In that particular case: The only technology preventing it right now is an oracle that feeds the data from sports to a smart contract. This technology is in its infancy.

You have, perhaps, developed too strong an opinion too soon and will need time when it does pop up in mainstream use around you.

It’s slower

and virtually impossible to hack

It’s harder to use

and virtually impossible to hack

It’s full of scams

people are idiots. I have literally never been scammed. If it’s not open source and a small group of insiders have massive bags of it, don’t invest, dumbass. Invest in cryptocurrencies that are TRULY decentralized by actually using your brain and reading.

It’s backed by nothing

It has intrinsic value. Gold is only worth something because someone says it has value.

There is no consumer protection

It easily could if regulators weren’t intentionally wishy washy about whether it is legal or not. Regulation will come. Sounds like you’re REALLY chomping at the bit to have the inevitable alternative: revocable central bank digital currencies.

It amplifies the existing problems of the financial system instead of solving them (money laundering/scams/financial inequality)

Not really. It is FAR more auditable than legacy systems. People are dumb. AI magnified how dumb companies are and so did crypto. People that understand it and AI will use it well. Those that villainize it (just like AI) do so because they are brainwashed by polarized viewpoints (just like AI). The truth is probably somewhere in the middle.

It’s dominated by the same rich cunts you’re trying to escape, but they’re even worse in crypto

That’s not true. Look at the financial holdings of billionaires in fiat vs. crypto. It’s FAR more egalitarian than fiat. You have to be talking about some fairly shitty cryptocurrencies for that to be true. Ethereum and Bitcoin have massive institutional investment. Their money is as green as anyone else’s.

All networks generally need L2s because they’re so shit and slow

It’s called architecture. Do you also not see the need for GPU’s and dedicated modules on a motherboard? Should the CPU do everything. Multithreading is bad I guess? Are you aware of what decentralization and parallelism can accomplish in technological spaces? Do you actually know what an L2 is? Seems like you don’t understand it.

Interesting you talk about gatekeeping information when you’re literally parroting crypto echo chamber rhetoric because if you dare suggest anything other than crypto is the future you will instantly get shut down. It’s a cult, basically.

Interesting that you don’t even have enough self-awareness or knowledge of the problem domains you claim to understand to see that you’re doing the EXACT same thing.

You parroted partially true (cherry picked) all the way down to completely untrue things about the properties of this technology. If you understood the technology in the first place, you’d recognize that. There are so many different permutations of it and you paint it with the broadest brush possible.

Tell me, do you know about proof of stake? Do you know what proof of work is? Do you understand the concept of an oracle?

Of course it doesn’t solve every problem (it won’t ever be used to stream video…of course…did anyone ever say it would?)…but the ones it DOES solve (that you pretend it hasn’t) are not achievable with any as of yet known technology.

Here’s just one that I’d love to see you pretend could exist on any other technology: Digital Identity and Land Deeds in war-torn (or even no longer existing) countries. Let’s say bombs destroy any paper deeds or even deeds on the servers all around a country. A person fleeing the country might return to the country and be homeless because they couldn’t prove that they owned that land. On a decentralized public blockchain, those deeds can be minted and henceforth can never be erased. Even if the official body that authorized them to be minted goes under or out of power, they are, in fact, IMPOSSIBLE TO ERASE SINCE THEY ARE ON A DECENTRALIZED BLOCKCHAIN and would be very hard if not impossible to discredit. The person would be legally able to get their house back.

Another one is voting. Electronic voting on a PUBLIC DECENTRALIZED blockchain would be literally the ONLY way to achieve a fully-open, auditable election. Furthermore, if you’re proposing that a similar centralized government solution (equal in all other ways other than one being truly decentralized and the other not) is even remotely similar in its robustness and trustworthiness, you’re SURELY being disingenuous.

There are TONS more but I don’t feel like wasting my time writing a term paper for someone that is clearly being disingenuous, parroting some world bank wage-slave neoliberal nonsense in the first place.

They simply want to make money for not creating any new content. They want subscribers not customers. They are currently in a new mode: rent seeking.

Pirate until they get their act together and offer something that has all content available, simply dividing up the proceeds fairly by percentage of viewing time.

Piracy is an availability problem. These assholes built 200 walled-gardens and are wondering why people don’t go to theirs.