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Cake day: December 6th, 2024

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  • Any other good in comparison

    Arguing good option bad…

    The second line doesn’t logically follow from the first - you’re talking about a relatively better option all the way to that top line and then you switch from “better than other” to “good” - it’s like going about how in a choice between being knifed twice versus being knifed just once the “just knifed once” is good in comparison and then jumping from that to saying that getting knifed once is good.

    Even beyond that totally illogical jump, the other flaw of logic is treating each election as a unique totally independent choice whose results have no impact on the options available on subsequent choices - I.e. that who the Democrat Party puts forwards and who the Republic Party puts forwards as candidates in an election isn’t at all influenced by how the electorate responded to previous candidates they put forward in previous elections - it is absolutely valid for people to refuse to vote for Kamala to “send a message to the Democrat Party” (I.e. to try to influence the candidates the party puts forward in subsequence election) and it’s around the validity or not of risking 4 years of Trump to try and get an acceptable Democrat candidate in at the end of it that the discussion should be (and there are valid points both ways) not the hyper-reductive falacy you seem so wedded to.

    Choices in the real world are a bit more multi faceted and with much more elements and implications than that self-serving “simpleton” slogan the DNC pushed out in its propaganda which you are parroting.


  • If the insurance didn’t create the atmosphere of territorial turfing, prices would be naturally set by competition. They would be much more accessible.

    Healthcare suffers from several very competition distorting Economic effects.

    • The so called “expert advantage”, which is the situation were the buyer doesn’t have the expertise to judge the quality of the service the seller is offering.
    • That buyers are willing to pay just about anything to survive, so unlike pretty much everything else the upper limit to prices is incredibly high (basically, everything a person has plus how much debt they can take in).
    • As somebody else pointed out, healthcare service provision is geographically constrained for a lot of things, the more urgent the situation the worse it gets, so for example if you have an accident and your life is in danger, if there is only one Hospital in town that’s were the ambulance will take you, so you literally have no choice.
    • The cost and time to train medical professionals as well as of the equipment, means that for anything beyond simple clinics there is a high barrier to entry into that market.

    Unlike the ideological pseudo-magical fantasy bullshit that some politicians spew about the Free Market in order to defend certain choices of theirs that benefit those who given them millionaire speech circuit fees and non-executive board memberships (namelly to justify privatising things that are in low competition or even natural monopoly markets), Free Market Theory only works for a few markets where there is a natural tendency for competition such as, say, teddy bears or soap, not for markets were there are multiple factors reducing choice and the ability of buyers to judge the quality of what they are buying before they buy it.





  • Not at all - re-read the last one.

    Not having to pay for Healthcare Insurance means it’s significantly cheaper for a person to do personal life projects that take months or years with little or no income, like getting further education or starting your own company, because your savings (or income from part time work) mainly have to cover housing and food, not Healthcare Insurance (which is almost as costly as housing, more so for people with pre-existing conditions)

    It’s easier to change your career and even your life in general when you don’t have that extra cost of Health Insurance (and hence have a longer “runway” for your new situation to take off and become self-sustainable, as your money will stretch more).


  • As somebody who has by now lived in 2 countries with Universal Healthcare I can answer that:

    • It’s for people who want faster access to non-emergency medical treatment than the public system will provide.

    So if you want to not to have to wait months for specialist appointments and surgery and you can afford it, you get Healthcare Insurance. This even more so for aesthetic and run of the mill dental treatment - the Public isn’t going to, for example, just put you in front of the queue to give you an implant unless it’s deemed necessary because of your health, so if your concern is about your appearance you’ll have to wait years or it won’t even be covered.

    Mind you, the whole thing is still backed by the Public Healthcare System: if during a surgery at a private hospital you have massive complications they’ll generally transfer you to a Public Hospital.

    Further, even in the Private everything is way cheaper because of the massive competition from the Public System, plus the Public even uses its leverage to keep the prices of more common medicine low (basically since most of the prescriptions are done by doctors in the Public System, for things were there are multiple options the most expensive stuff doesn’t get prescribed unless it offers enough benefit versus the cheaper options to justify it, so for example things like Insulin are way cheaper if you get it without a prescription from a Public System doctor and free or near free if you do because the State pays most or all of the price)

    Anyways, the single biggest benefit of Universal Healthcare which the “free market is the best” (in this case it isn’t: in general the free market optimizes for profit, not for outcomes, and further, in this domain people will pay whatever it takes to survive and don’t actually have the expertise to judge the quality of treatment and know the availability of other options, so there is no natural free market here) crowd forgets is the peace of mind and freedom Universal Healthcare gives:

    • if you lose your job, you’re still fine even if you have and accident or get sick
    • if you want to change jobs you have total freedom as you won’t be without Healthcare for you and your family in the period between jobs
    • if you need or want to stop working on a regular jobs (because you want to start your own company or want to take a sabatical or want to go back to school and get a degree) you can without losing your Healthcare coverage during that period and it’s going to be way cheaper than if you had to pay Health Insurance (and copays) during that time.

    Private Healthcare Systems are very much prisons that keep people tied to traditional jobs,





  • Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.comtoPeople Twitter@sh.itjust.worksNever ever
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    10 days ago
    • Don’t break the Law for the company or the boss.
    • Keep the company shit in company devices and your shit in your devices. That means company computer and phone for their stuff and your own for yours. If there’s ever any Lawsuit or Criminal investigation on the company they won’t take your stuff as evidence if you don’t at all use it for company work and won’t intrude in your privacy if the company stuff isn’t used for your own stuff.
    • Even if it’s totally legal, if something that your are being ordered to do against your better advice might come back to bite you (i.e. you might get blamed for the negative outcome you predict will come from it), get that order in writing.

    Even your direct lead can’t be assumed to be your friend (no matter how nice: niceness is easily and commonly faked) until you’ve gone through some proper shit together and he or she has shown themselves to be somebody that will take the hit rater than “blame their underlings” - trusts is earned, not due.





  • There are two things that the aftermath of Luigi’s action has made poignantly clear to pretty much everybody:

    • That the vast majority of people no matter their party affiliation and political leanings is feeling the pain and hates the abuses that carry on being committed by a minority of people in our system with total impunity … until Luigi.
    • That the Ju$tice System, the Police and most of the Press, unlike what they claim work for that minority of people, not for the rest of us.

    It’s amazing just how certain parts of the system that are supposed to work for everybody (such as in this case the Police, and in other cases large parts of the Press with their “poor CEO” articles) are pretty much shouting loud and clear for all to hear that “we’re not working for you, we work for the ones that abuse you”.

    Most people just discovered now with this killing of a hated CEO that what they individually felt about certain things was also felt by almost everybody, and then these bought-and-paid-for minions who for decades have been putting a lot of effort in passing themselves as “working for the community” just repeatedly and overtly signal to everybody else their true minion-of-the-rich nature.

    Mind you, as a Leftie who has been skeptical of whose those elements of the current system for decades, I’m happy they’re basically outing themselves and they should keep on doing it so that everybody sees them for what they really are and who they really serve,


  • Clearly my point about this being like Junior Devs thinking they know better that the “lusers” whilst not knowing enough to understand the limits of their knowledge hit the mark and hurt.

    It’s hilarious that you think a background in game making (by the way, love that hypocrisy of yours of criticizing me for pointing out my background whilst you often do exactly the same on your posts) qualifies you to understand things like the error rates in the time and amplitude domains inherent to the sampling and quantization process which is Analog-to-Digital conversion “FAR” better than a Digital Systems Electronics Engineering Degree - you are literally the User from the point of view of a Digital Systems EE.

    Then the mention of Physics too was just delicious because I also have part of a Physics degree that I took before changing to EE half way in my degree, so I studied it at Uni level just about long enough to go all the way to Quantum Mechanics which is a teensy weensy bit more advanced than just “energy” (and then, funnily enough, a great deal of EE was also about “energy”).

    Oh, and by the way, if you think others will Shut The Fuck Up just because you tell them to, you’re in for a big disappointment.


  • 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.



  • Nice content-free slogan.

    I’m not a Sound Engineer, I’m an Electronics Engineer - we’re the ones who had to find the right balance between fidelity, bit error rates, data rates and even circuit price when designing the digital audio sampling systems that capture from the analog world the digital data which the Sound Engineers use to work their magic: so I’m quite familiar with the limits of analog to digital conversion and that’s what I’m pointing out.

    As it so happens I also took Compression and Cryptography in my degree and am quite familiar with where the term “lossless” comes from, especially since I took that elective at the time when the first lossy compression algorithms were starting to come out (specifically wavelet encoding as used in JPEG and MPEG) so people had to start talking about “lossless” compression algorithms with regards to the kind of algorithms what until then had just been called compression algorithms (because until then there were no compression algorithms with loss since the idea of losing anything when compressing data was considered crazy until it turns out you could do it and save tons of space if it was for stuff like image and audio because of the limitations of human senses - essentially in the specific case of things meant to be received by human senses, if you could deceive the human senses then the loss was acceptable, whilst in a general data sense losing data in compression was unacceptable).

    My expertise is even higher up the Tech stack than the people who to me sound like Junior Devs making fun of lusers because they were using technical terms to mean something else, even while the Junior Devs themselves have yet to learn enough to understand the scope of usage and full implications for those technical terms (or the simple reality that non-Techies don’t have the same interpretation of technical terms as domain experts and instead interprete those things by analogy)