Great way to put it
GnuLinuxDude
joined 2 years ago
One of the objectives of single-payer is to drive down the costs of healthcare by eliminating the overhead of an insurance bureaucracy. There are other aspects that can be considered like nationalizing hospitals to eliminate private run, for-profit hospitals. People like this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HCA_Healthcare are just as responsible for the high per-capita costs of healthcare we pay as are the insurance companies. And I agree with you, they shouldn't be getting a guaranteed government handout.
I have a theory that I haven't explored yet. My mom is not a computer user. She barely knows how to use one, so she doesn't have knowledge of the MS Windows or MacOS approach of using computers. I suspect if I gave her a laptop with Ubuntu on it and showed her the ropes of how to use it she'd get along very fine. I think she would be able to navigate the UI and never need more technical knowledge than remembering her computer's password.
Now, before anyone goes and accuses me of being a bad son for leaving my mom in the technological dark, I just want to say she gets by pretty happily with the iPad I got for her, which has an even more foolproof interface than any traditional desktop OS.
The possibility exists, though I wouldn't hold my breath.
I literally don't think the plethora of choices has anything to do with why Linux is not installed by the masses. The only reason is that Microsoft and Apple are huge market forces with the ability to advertise, make deals with other business partners, pre-install their operating systems onto hardware that's sold, operate technical support services, and so on. They have completely flooded the market with their stuff.
Linux has these things, too, but nowhere in scale or scope, and with relative industry latecomers to sell it. If Linux were created 10-12 years sooner and companies like Suse, RH, Canonical, System76 were all formed earlier than they were I think we'd see a healthy amount of Linux out in the world, with maybe a few percent higher market share (which would be extremely massive).
Keep in mind that Apple, as a company, rebuilt itself truly not on the technical excellence of Macintosh, but by driving sales of iPods then iPhones.
Private health insurance is the biggest fucking scam ever. The private insurance companies benefit by getting the aggregate healthiest population into their plans (working adults). The most likely to be expensive people, i.e. old people (on medicare) or poor people (on medicaid, or not even on an insurance plan) are on government, tax payer insurance plans. There is literally no reason except for corporate profiteering that Medicare should not be expanded to cover all people.
Also all those conversations, especially in the 2020 election period, were totally bullshit. You say something like M4A will cost 44 trillion dollars or whatever, which sounds like an insane amount of money. What is often left out of the discussion is that estimated cost was 1) over 10 years and 2) has to be weighed against the current costs we already pay for insurance. So the deal was very simple: the overall costs would go down because the overall spending would be less, and at the same time millions of people without coverage would be covered, and at the same time you don't have to contemplate stupid bullshit like in network, out of network providers. Or ever again talk to your insurance about why something is or isn't covered. Boils my blood when I think too much about this.
Not even gonna weigh in on things like how medicare can't negotiate prescription drug prices (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/23/us/politics/medicare-drug-price-negotiations-lawsuits.html), or how dental, vision, and hearing are treated separately from general healthcare, or how med school is prohibitively expensive, or how the residents after med school are overworked because the guy who institutionalize that practice was literally a cokehead. Those are all just bonus topics. The point is we are getting fleeced.
When I said violence I don't mean against the robots (which you can damage but not commit violence against). It's just a computer on wheels. I meant that labor reform will involve violence between people in the labor class and the capital class. Our American history is full of examples of exactly this kind of thing happening between a protest labor movement and its countervailing force.
Delightful :)
let the robots be and improve society to the point technology said it would. We re the most productive we’ve ever been in our entire history yet work more than any other time in history. We need work reform, not a robot genocide.
I am in agreement with you, but the problem is the work reform part is not forthcoming. The delivery robots didn't come with a helping of any kind of labor reform, whatsoever, and will not come with one either without some kind of violence to usher in the deal. The capitalist class would not allow it to happen any other way.
The suggestions in this document may be of interest to you if you are willing to give aomenc one last look. And as for using it with ffmpeg, aomenc benefits from a two pass encode (which av1an will do automatically) https://gist.github.com/shssoichiro/a46ff01db70243c1719479f6518ea34d
How can the term "Open Source" have been coined in 1998 when I can clearly hear it be uttered here in 1985? https://youtu.be/0DdoGPav3fc?t=832
Ok but then how will my ~~kids~~ record company benefit into perpetuity?
In all seriousness, I think copyright law is the best example of how captured our government is to large corporate interests.