Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[McTraveller]

Yes, we really need to work on getting the cost of common treatment down.  I still maintain though that you don't do that (in the long term) by forcing everyone to get insurance, you do that by breaking down barriers to entry, removing regulatory capture, and encouraging more people to become health providers.  Yeah in the short term getting people some type of insurance or maybe even single-payer will help, but it's not sustainable.

Long term, using example of medication: you have to eliminate the possibility of people buying up all the legal supply of a drug and jacking the price up to "what the market will bear." There are several ways to do this, either by allowing all "old" formulae (e.g., the insulin from 50 years ago) to still be allowed for treatment so anyone can produce it, or by saying that all medicine patents are implicitly owned by the people, not the companies, and must be produced by no fewer than three manufacturers.  I'd rather have the "government" itself have a lab that is producer of last resort than the monopoly situation we have today.

You have to make it easier for people to provide basic healthcare services - we should have tiers of medical care that don't require 8 years of expensive education.  We should have a system that doesn't effectively require all practitioners to work for a giant hospital conglomerate.

Incidentally doing those things also inherently means there is more medical capacity, because it is less expensive to have that capacity, which will make society more robust to our current type of situation as well.

EDIT:  It's not really the health insurance execs that are raking in the cash from high pharma prices, even though they are easy to vilify. It's the hospitals and pharma groups with regulatory capture.  If you get to know some health insurance folks, they are stuck in a terrible place between patients, the government and other large negotiating bodies, and the providers.  They are the only group that has to work with all three.

[Il Palazzo]

Do you not have a law that protects you, when you commit a crime (in this example, steal insulin / rob a pharmacy for insulin), where the sole motive is preservation of life (in this case of your child), so that you will be found guilty, but not sentenced?

Don't you know? The setting of Les Miserables is 21st century USA.

[Quarque]

why would I be shamed for voting for a third party?

It is much smarter than not voting at all, as a way to signal your dislike of the democratic nominee.

Out of curiosity, what third party do you have in mind?

[Frumple]

When you are electing one single person for the entirety of a nation... no you can't expect them to represent your interests as much when you're significantly the minority faction, being bluntly realistic. Will there be a democratic nominee who mostly represents the left flank of the party? Not for a while, considering Bernie is currently getting crushed.

If we were actually that much of a minority, then I'd be more sympathetic to your point.  But we're talking like 70-80% of voters under 40.

Bruv, if that were true we'd be dealing with a very different situation. Busters are currently polling at like 4-6% of supporters, not under 40s. Turnout depression's probably higher than that, but it's not anywhere near 70-80% of voters. Most of us under 40 folks are not happy but we're still damn sure going to vote and probably vote blue. Bloomshit or gabbard might have been a bridge too far on that front, but biden just... isn't. As near as we can tell right now. That might change in a future election, when someone closer to AOC runs against someone what isn't trump, but it's pretty damn unlikely to be this one, for better or worse.

[DemonOfWrath]

And then those voters don't actually turn out to vote enough to win, or come close. Even when they have someone who does represent then. You are that much of a minority, else maybe Bernie wouldn't be getting blown out. It's not even close.

And no, Bernie would've lost 2016 even without all the fuckery going on simply from vote totals. And honestly I don't know what you're talking about with exit polls because I'm having a flick through some and they're very accurate to the actual results (surprisingly close considering things like candidates dropping out during early voting).

Also note I'm saying I do that with my vote in a runoff system, so I do that knowing that I still have to decide who that vote goes to 2nd/3rd/4th and that vote isn't purely wasted (the first choice actually does matter for other things even if the party loses). So I still have to make the same shitty choice knowing that's where my vote likely matters.

[SalmonGod]

When you are electing one single person for the entirety of a nation... no you can't expect them to represent your interests as much when you're significantly the minority faction, being bluntly realistic. Will there be a democratic nominee who mostly represents the left flank of the party? Not for a while, considering Bernie is currently getting crushed.

If we were actually that much of a minority, then I'd be more sympathetic to your point.  But we're talking like 70-80% of voters under 40.

Bruv, if that were true we'd be dealing with a very different situation. Busters are currently polling at like 4-6% of supporters, not under 40s. Turnout depression's probably higher than that, but it's not anywhere near 70-80% of voters. Most of us under 40 folks are not happy but we're still damn sure going to vote and probably vote blue. Bloomshit or gabbard might have been a bridge too far on that front, but biden just... isn't. As near as we can tell right now. That might change in a future election, when someone closer to AOC runs against someone what isn't trump, but it's pretty damn unlikely to be this one, for better or worse.

The 70-80% I was referring to was based on exit polls in the primary thus far.  Who's been voting for Bernie in the primaries.  I didn't mean Bernie-or-Busters.  But it should be pretty unsurprising that when you have two primary candidates who are so starkly opposed to one another that the one who loses will take a chunk of their voters with them.  If they were less different, then less voters would be lost.

Out of curiosity, what third party do you have in mind?

I generally vote green when given the opportunity.

[Frumple]

Like... it's one of those things polling seems to be indicating you wouldn't fukkin' start to guess from the online ecosystem, but from what I understand, to all appearances, even among younger voters, something over a majority of dem voter folks don't see some great difference between the candidates. General sentiment for basically all the democrat candidates has apparently been pretty high, with some exceptions (bloomshit, pete with certain minorities, etc.). High online/politically connected folks show different behavior there, but even among youngins that's, y'know, a minority among minorities. The rest of electorate just doesn't seem to be following the same sort of patterns.

Which, I mean, is probably a good thing if you care more about getting trump out of office than which geriatric does the kicking, I guess.

[Reelya]

From what I seen and read, even though people might not see a "great difference between the candidates", and you might not think the dems selected are progressive enough, but the end result of the last 40 years has been that every Republican administration has been totally fucked in a number of ways that the interceding Democratic administrations just haven't been.

Carter promised to hand back the Panama Canal to Panama, then Reagan happened, and during Bush I, they invaded Panama (dubious motives / timing, also a test-run for Iraq War I), then Clinton comes in, and honors Carter's agreement. I'm kinda betting a Republican would have reneged. Then Bush II and Iraq War II, then Obama. I can't see the Carter, Clinton, Obama gang being anywhere near as bad as the Reagan, Bush, Bush, Trump gang by a longshot. The level of corruption and secret dirty wars that have gone on under those guys, and courting international war criminals as buddies. Maybe you can dig up a few examples of that with Democrats, i don't know, but not the constant revolving door the Republicans have for this stuff.

Sure, there are common things that are fucked about both of them, but the differences are stark too. That's because it's not just the candidates, it takes a team to run the government and when you have a Democrat in power, they will draw from the wider Democrat ranks to fill positions, and there is also politicking in a good way when this happens - negotiation between the wings of the party as to whom is running what.

Clinton may have sucked in a number of ways, but you'd have paid parental leave by now if she was elected, along with probably a number of Obamacare expansions and something being done about global warming. It's laughable to say that you can 'um and ah' and say she would have been equivalent to Trump in any recognizable way.

[SalmonGod]

Clinton may have sucked in a number of ways, but you'd have paid parental leave by now if she was elected, along with probably a number of Obamacare expansions and something being done about global warming. It's laughable to say that you can 'um and ah' and say she would have been equivalent to Trump in any recognizable way.

Gee... maybe the DNC shouldn't have boosted Trump in the Republican primary under the direct leadership of her campaign.  Maybe that kinda makes Trump her fault a little bit.

[TamerVirus]

Georgia and Louisiana have both delayed their primaries because of pestilence.
Will this have any implications?
Probably not;the south seems like Biden territory anyway

[Frumple]

Eh, they got till july, more or less. If more places get delayed we might actually see some of the later states kinda' matter for once.

E: Oh hey, we seem to have basically scraped the bottom of the financial bag of tricks we could call on to mitigate a recession... prior to the recession actually hitting? Welcome back '08, I guess. Except probably worse. We don't have nearly as competent a government this time

[Max™]

I don't even know how to react to 0% interest from the fed and it looking like the dow is still gonna open at a loss tomorrow.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

React by reading investor forums - shit is hilarious.

If they actually go for negative interest rates you know we're looking at the Great Annihilation, which I'm going to keep using until you are all using it.

Capitalism is like a shark in many ways. One of those ways is if it stops swimming, it starts drowning. We just stopped swimming.

[Frumple]

I don't even know how to react to 0% interest from the fed and it looking like the dow is still gonna open at a loss tomorrow.

Eh, shit's pretty simple. First you laugh a bit, then you cry a bit, then you do whatever your normal day is 'cause even if a recession is about to join hands with a boomer murdering plague to omnifuck the country you still got your normal stuff to do in the interim leading up to the shit proper hitting the fan. Maybe stock up on some long term supplies if you can work any in between your locality's pandemic panic buying sprees.

[Greiger]

Do you not have a law that protects you, when you commit a crime (in this example, steal insulin / rob a pharmacy for insulin), where the sole motive is preservation of life (in this case of your child), so that you will be found guilty, but not sentenced?

If I understand correctly a jury can do something called a Jury Nullification.  Where the jury finds you guilty but does not want to convict.  But there are a number of problems with that.

1. It is apparently jury tampering to notify a jury that that is an option, even if you yourself are a member of said jury.
2. It is something the vast majority of jurors do not know about.
3. Much of the time it is invoked a mistrial is just declared instead. Nullifying the jury nullification, telling the jury to go home, and just making everyone else involved do the trial again, this time hopefully with a less rebellious jury.

Not a lawyer or anything.  Just someone who likes looking up obscure things.