There’s a time and place for disagreements, but basic human rights ain’t it. If this was the 1980s and we were all arguing over whether the wealthy getting yet another tax break would actually benefit the poor you might have a point. At this point the argument is about whether trans people should be allowed to exist and whether birth right citizenship should be removed (to say nothing of the concentration camps). Those are not disagreements anyone needs to hear.

Windows will be the default until suddenly it isn’t. Valve is doing amazing at destroying the core of Microsoft’s support. This story would be different if this was a decade ago, but these days most average people do their computing on phones and tablets. The ones sticking to traditional PCs are mostly gamers and now more than ever Linux is a viable alternative to Windows. Vanishingly few games can’t be played perfectly fine on Linux. Once enough gamers are using Linux it will become the default choice, and once it’s the default choice for gamers it will become the default choice for most people, at least the ones not on phones and tablets.

OK, but now, what if instead of everyone using that money to buy insurance the government just bought the insurance for everyone. And then what if instead of paying an insurance company to pay healthcare expenses the government just directly paid those healthcare expenses. It would be so much simpler with a lot fewer middlemen involved.

Only the first one can be fixed by competition, the rest aren’t impacted by that at all. There are too many moving parts for it all to magically go away by just saying “make them compete”. For instance what happens when insurance companies compete to offer the best deals on group rates to employers but then charge exorbitant premiums to employees? Or what if insurance premiums all magically came down but pharmaceutical prices kept skyrocketing?

Medical costs are an inelastic demand as well as a non-discretionary expense. That’s an absolutely terrible combination which means they’re almost entirely isolated from market forces.

Consider for instance a situation I find myself in. I need a certain medication for a permanent medical condition. Fortunately there are multiple medications available (often due to patents there’s only a single option). Unfortunately I’m allergic to all but one of them. That means it doesn’t matter if the pharmaceutical company is charging $5 or $5000 I’m paying for it. I literally have no choice. Whether my insurance pays for 100% of that or 0% doesn’t change what the pharmaceutical company is charging. Further for insurance I was offered a choice of about 5 different plans through my employer (which is a lot by most standards, often employers only offer one or two plans). My insurance is by all metrics terrible, I pay thousands of dollars every year in deductibles, but once I hit those deductibles it covers everything at 90% which with my medical expenses save me tens of thousands of dollars a year. There are cheaper plans of course, but then the tradeoff is that I’m restricted to a tiny handful of doctors who are all terrible and every single medical decision has to be pre-approved by the insurance company or they don’t cover it and I’d rather pay the extra thousand dollars a year to keep those decisions between me and my doctors.

The US medical system is a hydra and fixing any one part doesn’t actually solve anything. The entire system needs to be overhauled top to bottom. Switching to a single payer system is just the first step in that process but it’s a necessary one because otherwise the problem is intractable. It’s likely the patent system is going to need to be overhauled at least with regards to medications before it’s fixed as well.

Mostly because:

A) Insurance companies collude with each other

B) are only half the problem (the other half being hospitals and pharmaceutical companies cranking prices up)

C) Most Americans get their insurance through their employer

and

D) Healthcare costs are complicated because they’re split between insurance premiums and out of pocket expenses and typically raising one lowers the other and vice versa

Insurance was always a terrible way to handle healthcare expenses because healthcare costs are generally non-discretionary and have far too many moving parts and payers.

At first I wasn’t convinced because it hasn’t posted much in the last couple hours, but then I got back to about 3h ago and there’s an absolute tsunami of posts. I stopped scrolling after like the 10th page of messages all in that same 1 hour period. It’s either a bot or they need to cut back on the cocaine.

What are you talking about? Nobody said anything about AI?

They’re also doing an amazing job of very accurately depicting all his minions.

It’s because of how bifurcated the American economy (and society) has become. The absolutely gargantuan wealth inequality leads to a situation that for the majority of Americans they’ve been experiencing a recession for years at this point if not decades, while for the wealthy things are going great. The US economy is literally being propped up by the continued funneling of wealth from the poor to the rich. The problem is the poor are rapidly approaching the point where they have no more wealth to steal. The middle class is almost entirely drained, and even some of the lower end of the upper class is starting to feel squeezed. It’s not sustainable and something is going to give one way or another. The economy can’t continue to function when over half the population can no longer afford basic necessities.

They probably could have kept the plates spinning for another decade at least, but then a moron got put in charge of everything and started replacing people who were greedy and corrupt with people that were greedy, corrupt, and barely smart enough to remember how to breath. This recent shutdown in particular is very much going to force the issue as all the people reliant on SNAPP and Medicaid (or is it Medicare, I can never remember which is which) are going to find themselves unable to meet their basic human needs from their meager salaries (if they’re lucky enough to be employed). Unfortunately I wouldn’t be surprised to see an increase in theft and rioting if this doesn’t get resolved real damn soon (might I suggest stealing the tacky gold plated shit from your nearest Mar-a-lago or Trump affiliated business). Even more unfortunately that might be exactly the excuse Trump is looking for to declare martial law. This is what nearly half a century of Reaganomics has gotten us. Maybe we can finally convince some of these idiots that cutting taxes on the rich and removing regulations on corporations does absolutely nothing good.

Cheque and check are two different things you’re just uneducated. A check is the mark you make to select a box, while a cheque is the thing you write to transfer money from one bank account to another. They’re different and yes people all over the US know the difference between the two.

Lol, I’m American, you just can’t spell. Cheque is the correct way to spell it, check is incorrect. You also don’t know how SS actually functions. Congress has treated it like a slush fund for decades and constantly steals money from it. And yes it is a budget item that gets voted on like anything else. You might think it’s an independent account, but that’s just the way it’s reported on the accounting forms, absolutely nothing is stopping Congress from taking those funds and spending them on whatever they want and in fact on many many occasions they’ve done exactly that.

That’s the great misconception and lie of Social Security. People think it’s like a government run 401k, that you’re "investing’ in some retirement account every paycheck. That’s not at all how it actually functions though. Social Security is two entirely independent things. First it’s a benefits program like SNAPP or Medicaid. In that regard Congress votes every year on how much budget they’re going to allocate towards paying people Social Security. Literally everyone receiving Social Security cheques in the following year are reliant on Congress deciding to allocate enough money to make sure those cheques don’t bounce. Secondly it’s an income tax. The two are not connected in any way. The amount of Social Security income tax that the federal government collects each year has absolutely no bearing on the amount of funding that Congress allocates for Social Security in the coming year.

Let that sink in.

Social Security is the world’s biggest Ponzi scheme. Always has been. That’s a huge part of why a lot of Republicans, particularly older ones (like ones around retirement age) are hand wringing about falling birth rates. Social Security always counted on the idea that there would be more people working and paying into Social Security than the number of people currently collecting Social Security. In a country with a positive population growth that would always be true. It ceases to be true the moment you have a negative population growth rate though.

It’s very popular to the point where multiple other distros are starting to offer its patched kernel on their distro. It’s very focused on gaming performance, particularly around Steam and Proton.

Yeah that should be completely fine then. Try dual boot, if you don’t have any issues you can always go 100% Linux at some point in the future and in the meantime the old Windows partition can provide some amount of reassurance if something does go wrong.

Is it a newer Nvidia GPU? If so I believe it pretty much works the same these days. It was mostly the older Nvidia GPUs that seemed to have a lot of problems.

Pretty sure I wouldn’t get donations from Aipac to start but if they’re stupid enough to donate to me I don’t see why I shouldn’t spend their money and go about my business.

The reason not to is because of the optics. People will always assume anyone you’re accepting money from you’ll show favoritism towards either consciously or unconsciously. That is generally how briberycampaign finance works these days. Large corporation, state, or billionaire “donates” to a politician, and in exchange they get to write whatever legislation they want or get the politician to vote for or against anything they want.

Cachyos seems like the general recommendation. Haven’t used it myself, but I’ve used its kernel so I guess that counts for something.

The title makes it sound like a lot more than it actually is. TL;DR: the most recent Republican gerrymander in one state wasn’t as bad as it might have been and it’s expected Republicans will try to re-gerrymander to make it worse. If they do Democrats are going to try to collect 250k signatures on a public petition which would then trigger a legal loophole that would revert things back to the currently gerrymandered but slightly less than it could have been map until after the 2026 election. Nationally there’s still no answer to the multiple Republican controlled states that are rigging elections in various ways.

They don’t even know how to use a gamepad nevermind a keyboard and mouse. If it doesn’t have a touchscreen and big shiny icons it’s too complicated for them. One step closer to Idiocracy.

Considering everything we know about Trump, yeah this guy would 100% be his spiritual advisor, they’re cut from the same cloth. He would have fit right in alongside Trump in Epstein’s club.