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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: September 23rd, 2023

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  • To me, it’s all about rational return on investment providing economic incentives to achieve what we want to achieve.

    My favorite example to explain what I mean is my own personal health insurance. I have a chronic medical condition that requires constant medication, frequent visits to specialists, and expensive medical tests and procedures. There is simply zero chance that I will ever pay enough in a monthly premium to cover what I cost. Meaning I am always a net financial loss for a private, for-profit insurance company.

    This gives a private company every incentive in the world to obstruct and deny my care in hopes that I’ll get frustrated and give up, or maybe even die and get off their books forever.

    The government, on the other hand, has a positive financial incentive to keep me healthy. If I am healthy, I am working, paying taxes, buying goods and services that contribute to the economy, and hopefully contributing something beneficial to my community. Only the government (acting as a proxy for “society”) naturally profits from insuring my healthcare.

    This is why I believe we should have fully socialized medical care. Because there are some specific things that only the government has natural positive economic incentives that align with what is beneficial for the general public.

    Whatever those things are, they should be socialized. And generally those things are basic life sustaining things like food, housing, medicine, education, utilities.

    I’m fine with privatized capitalism in a very restricted, heavily regulated niche form. But all the basic necessities should be socialized.









  • This was very much my experience with the trans girl I grew up with 35 years ago. From the instant she was able to express preferences (I’m talking like age 18 months to 2 years), it was all princesses and dolls and makeup and trying on mom’s high heels. We all just assumed she was a gay boy because we had never heard of a transgender person before.

    We encouraged her to just keep that behavior at home because she was bullied mercilessly for appearing to be an effeminate boy. But nothing would stop her; she was completely irrepressible.

    When in high school, she told us she was really a girl, it was like the most face-palmingly obvious thing. Of COURSE that’s what we’d been seeing her entire life. It just made sense. That’s just who she is.






  • I can’t tell you how often this ends old people’s lives. They start to aspirate food, get hospitalized for nasty pneumonia because of it, we try to feed them pureed food (essentially baby food all over again) and thicken their drinks, they struggle to stay hydrated and nourished because of it, they aspirate and end up in the hospital again. Rinse, repeat.

    This is shockingly common. Evolution is a dick.


  • Oh I hadn’t even thought of that. I have two accounts because when I started using Boost for Lemmy, my home instance wasn’t supported, so I signed up for startrek.website.

    My old account would appear to be an inactive user in the numbers, which is not really accurate. But also it means that bump in users that happened during the reddit exodus was partially driven by duplicate sign ups.