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Comment by questinthrow | Hacker News Reader

Its inevitable because of the power dynamics between democracies and totalitarian regimes. Democracies thought that with the internet they would topple totalitarianism because of free flow of information. They forgot that totalitarian regimes can just imprison and shoot all who have access to and propagate the information. Now the wheel has turned and the same regimes are weaponizing AI and shill farms to create enough propaganda to destabilize a democracy for the price of a few dollars. We're all headed towards a global race to the bottom because of it, the dream of the early internet has been crushed because of human evil.

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“Democracy” like the one we have in the US where voters are powerless to change policy

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...

US and British democracy certainly aren't the best implementations around. If you wanted to divide and rule you couldn't come up with a better voting system for that than first-past-the-post.

First past the post is fine. It's the people who don't vote the way I do that are the problem!

without the sarcasm people not voting is a huge issue. voter suppression is a central tactic for conservatives. Openly their cult leader recognizes "if everyone voted we'd never have another republican elected president"

Information-free voting is also a huge issue. Having everyone vote-as-Tim-does is rule-by-Tim but by another name.

Interesting, some say that the US is the only real democracy in the world. The UK is not, nor any other countries in the world.

They base this assertion in two principles that any democracy should fulfill:

1) Power separation. 2) Representativity.

I can see that you don't agree with this, but what country has a better system then?

Switzerland, we can actually vote for things instead of voting for people who we hope will vote for what we want.

And the proliferation of ballot questions in US states has been a rather mixed bag. And in many locales in the US, there are direct votes on many local matters.

Not that I disagree, but what I believe makes Switzerland a functioning democracy is that people feel represented. Go complain about the result of a vote in Switzerland and people will say "did you vote?" instead of following you to invade the Capitol. If you did vote, then people will say "well, you're in the minority then".

The mere fact that most people feel that way shows, to me, that the system works. Compare that to e.g. France where Macron got less than 20% in the first round. It means that 80% of the votes were not for him, and of the 20% remaining, a lot did not want him but just thought he was the best chance against the far-right candidate. Right when Macron was re-elected, you could say that more than 80% of the people who voted did not want him. That's a problem IMO.

Not even talking about the US presidents...

> "well, you're in the minority then"

49% minority = get fucked

<1% minority = here's your new lords and saviours

Not sure what you mean. The people in Switzerland votes for a ton of stuff (not just for a president every 4 years). If you manage to always be on the minority, then probably you are doing it on purpose. The norm is that people are sometimes in the minority, sometimes in the majority. That's called consensus, that's what makes for a good democracy IMO.

The opposite (again IMO) is a system where the people votes for a president every 4 years, and invades the Capitol when they lose. BTW Switzerland does not have a president, but instead a group of 7 representing the biggest parties in the country. So there is consensus even at the highest level.

>Interesting, some say that the US is the only real democracy in the world.

Who? The talking heads paid to do so?

huh...I always thought of the US as a republic with some democratic features. I mean that's why we have things like the electoral college. Your voice influences but doesn't not actually drive.

Well, I would have said that the base criteria for a democracy is that the government is an extension of the will of the people (hence the name). But we can agree that Power separation and Representativity are reasonable proxies. But the US isn't well set up for representativity at all. Without going into the finer issues like gerrymandering or the more controversial things like the electoral college, the core issue is that a first-past-the-post system means there can only be two meaningful parties. So you can only really have two sides, when real issues often are far more nuanced than that.

As a born-and-raised US citizen who went through US schooling and therefore got a load of political science, no.

The US is a republic. You could call it a form of democracy, but you would first call it a republic before a democracy. Representativity is what makes it NOT a democracy.

James Madison, a US founding father, felt that (direct) democracy led to mob rule and did not think that people directly voting on issues was a good idea. You can read his opinion from 1788 in the Federalist Papers, #55: https://guides.loc.gov/federalist-papers/text-51-60#s-lg-box...

"Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob." - Alexander Hamilton or James Madison

The world of political science is massive. There is no "best" system because once you read through this entire body of study, you realize it consists of compromises. People have been trying to figure this out for a very long time.

Voting behavior can be easily hacked as one can see in world elections. Its not for nothing you have analyst, advisors or other sort of experts in the field of electioneering.

Here's what happens in 'better democracy implementations':

https://www.democracynow.org/2024/4/16/germany_palestine#:~:...

I'm sure that makes the medicine go down easier, but we're not powerless at all. We choose to have no say. We choose not to run our own campaigns and get grassroots approval. Less than half of us vote. The rest accept the status quo, despite the fact that they don't have to. We give away our power.

All of the methods by which a dark horse can run and win are there. The state will not remove your votes or intimidate voters not to vote for you. You will not be poisoned by radioactive toxins to prevent you from running. You will not be kidnapped, or your family threatened, or a bomb set off in polling locations. This isn't in any way like so many other actually repressive regimes. All you have to do is go and run.

We have more power in this society than anyone in any other. So why do we claim we're powerless? Because it makes us feel better that we're so lazy. I could run for office, but that might restrict my time watching The Office. Better to just say that running is pointless, so I don't have to make the change I want to see.

And even if you don't want to run, you can vote for independents, you can complain to your representatives, you can organize your friends and neighbors to petition local government for local reforms and participate in larger state and federal efforts. Individually we may be a drop in the bucket, but collectively we are a wave. You can't say that isn't powerful.

I vouched for this comment to be non-dead. I'm not a US citizen, but I can see why this comment would be contentious for US citizens. I also think it's a valid point, and doesn't cross any HN guidelines (more than other comments that exist in this thread). I'd like to give it another chance and see how it goes.

People who downvoted or flagged the above post are themselves examples of what’s killing HN. Bunch of snowflakes who don’t want to hear the truth: Political engagement works and matters even at the small scale - we are just lazy as hell.

Look to how unpopular CSPAN is. Everyone says they want the “truth” of politics. The truth is on CSPAN, and no one watches it.

Unfortunately what you've said is just not true.

We do have some power, but the system is absolutely intended to suppress the power of the masses. The senate as an institution, the cap on the number of reps in the house, the electoral college, representative rather than parliamentary legislature elections, dark money/super PACs/Citizen's United (and other things that look even closer to outright bribery) and first-past-the-post are ALL anti-democractic institutions intended to preserve the status quo for the already wealthy and powerful.

As for having more power than any other society? Delusional. There are far more democractic electoral systems.

> but the system is absolutely intended to suppress

This seems asinine. I am not psychic, I can't always deduce intentions, but sometimes I can see the lack of intent. Things evolve, they develop, and though there might be many factions hoping to steer things in directions they want it to go, the net effect of many factions doing this is our ship just swirling around randomly in the ocean.

When you talk about "intent", it's just rabblerousing. You hope to rile people up, so they'll do what you prefer they would do. It's unnecessary to talk about intent. Whether the system was intended to suppress the power of the masses, or whether the system randomly and quite accidentally developed to do that is moot if it suppresses the masses. The only thing reasonable people should be discussing is:

1. Does this system suppress the power of the masses?

2. Should that change? It's not all that clear that the masses should have power. We've seen what mobs and riots are like, and most of you are ill-informed, opinionated, and susceptible to the effects of rabble-rousing.

As for answers, I think yes, it does suppress power of the masses. I would be skeptical the intelligence of someone who suggested otherwise. And on the second, I'm uncertain... there are days where it seems like only a lunatic would want the masses to have power. But, if they don't have it, others do, and whoever they happen to be, I've not seen many outcomes I've liked.

> the cap on the number of reps in the house

Haha. Do you want that to change? I stumbled upon a weird political science hack a few years back, and I'm convinced that as few as a dozen people (nobodies, even) might change that by the time the next census rolls around. Low effort, you might have to allocate 15 minutes to go talk to a state rep/senator (plus a few hours to prepare... rehearsal, haircut, getting your nice clothes dry-cleaned). It'd bump the number up to something like 5800+ reps in Congress.

The other stuff's all dead in the water. But I know how to ruin the rep cap.

> The state will not remove your votes

Tell that to Al Gore.

> We have more power in this society than anyone in any other. So why do we claim we're powerless? Because it makes us feel better that we're so lazy

No, because you are actually powerless:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/dec/29/fbi-co...

If the ruling class cant derail all your efforts in peripheral ways, it just pulls out the good old fascism trick.

Yes, the US gives all the rights you list to its citizens. But with representation wffectively degenerated into a two-party system by the quirks of the eletion systems, any independent candidates must gather massive support to have a chance. It is more likely that an independent candidate will end up supporting their worst opposition because winner takes all heavily punishes splinter factions by completely discarding their votes.

This is the reason why Kennedy's efforts to appear on the ballots can ultimately hand Trump the presidential election by splitting the Biden canp.P

The US has culturally accepted this flawed system. The UK has a multiparty parliament despite first past the post. This comes at the price of up to more than 60% of the votes getting effectively discarded.

I believe firmly that the US would be served better today if it transitioned to a proportional voting system. But the constitution is treated with too much deference to expect meaningful updates to get it in line with 21st century realities.

The data just doesn't bear this out:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_third-party_and_indepe...

It's more than the ability to put your name on a ballot, between the media control the main parties have, their purposeful entrenchment and anticompetitive setup, and the necessary financial burden; your biggest problem is that simply nobody will know who you are.

Both are true and feed each other.

My state passed a democratic ballot measure to set up a non-partisan redistricting committee. When it came time to instate new district maps, our state Senate pretended to consider the committee's maps, and voted for their own maps; despite the vocal outage of nearly every citizen who shared a comment on the situation.

I can't coordinate with my "community", when my senators have declared it to include downtown SLC, Tooele, Beaver, Cedar City, St. George, etc. To contrast, Utah County (the most consistently Conservative area in the state) basically gets its own district.

How about a pm last less than 60 days? Any totalitarian country like that. We are talking about a country my exam question is “all Brits are slaves, discuss”. Still.

Anyway may be you are the bots we talked about. And if not even more sad.

Not true.

Too many people think they have to run for congress or president instead of thinking more locally. Jesse Ventura is a great example of what the founders envisioned as encouraging people to get involved in politics. He was unhappy with the local city government. He ran for mayor and won and spent four years in charge. Went back to his private sector life and then five years after leaving office, ran for governor and won.

I've had friends get involved in their local politics and have been effective. My buddy was a professional skateboarder and run twice for a local office and he barely lost both times and has vowed to stay involved in his cities politics.

You're seeing more and more people getting involved at the national level who said they never had any inkling of getting involved in politics but have thrown their hats in the ring.

There was a reason the founders made the barrier extremely low to get involved in politics, either locally or nationally. They wanted people to have a say in how their governments are run and to make it simple for them to be the change they want to see.

As a counterpoint, Jesse Ventura was famous before he got into politics. It's much harder to win when no one knows who you are.

Fair point, however. . .

Jesse had been out of wrestling for years before running for mayor of Brooklyn Park. You have to remember this was back in the late 80,s early 90's when there wasn't any internet or social media. I remember reading an article about him resolving some issue the voters brought to him thinking, "I had no idea the guy was still living in the state, let alone running a city as their mayor."

I will give you he did use his radio show to air his grievances and tell stories about his wrestling years and being a frogman (the precursors to the SEALs) so that did bring him back into the public spotlight. He ironically had always dabbled in politics, and even appeared on Howard Stern saying he was going to run for president with gulp Donald Trump who made a guest appearance with him talking about it when he was governor.

So you're right, by the time he ran for governor, he was back to being very well known and leveraged that to a degree where he had to give up his radio show in order to run for governor.

Sure, surveil all internet traffic is just to prevent 'human evil,' not to perpetuate it further.

I can't even imagine writing this comparison of democracy vs. totalitarian regimes while the 'democracy' is behaving in the same way as a totalitarian regime in this context.

A ridiculous fairy tale. Dictatorships need hardly interfere with the "stability" of a society which launches a bloody and monumentally expensive temper tantrum in response to 9/11 but allows thousands more to die each year for want of basic medicines

>A <$insert hyper emotional disparagement>. Dictatorships need hardly interfere with the "stability" of a society which <$insert random example some democratic failure>.

And yet they do interfere. We've seen plenty of evidence, from Russia, Iran, China and (I still can't believe how they got competent at this, but there you go) North Korea.

And in some cases they've been successful at destabilizing formerly fairly sane and stable democratic countries. The social divisions that the UK And US currently find themselves in could be attributed in part to this steady drip of caustic interference.

However, as a "short term pessimist, but long term optimist" (Hitchens), I'm optimistic that we will start to introspect a bit more as societies and begin to be less easily manipulated. It will take a while, but I believe even now the tide is turning.

> The social divisions that the UK And US currently find themselves in could be attributed in part to this steady drip of caustic interference.

Please look away from the curtain hiding rising wealth inequality, cost of living, and the financialization of daily needs. There are no material explanation for the rising contradictions. It is simply our boogymen misleading our population.

It is good we as a society make bets on housing! Who needs to sleep under a roof when you can own shares!

I agree with you that things are currently quite bad, and need to get better. From my UK centric viewpoint, over the last decade Brexit, climate change and the pandemic have proven fertile ground for diverting peoples' attention away from societal issues that have not been addressed, or have even exacerbated by wilful neglect of basic services by Government.

But I have the feeling that that well of constant culture wars has run dry, and people are becoming more wary of being drawn into endless fruitless debates about these things. And after looking up form their smartphones they've finally seen all of the signs for Food Banks, noticed that the weather has gone insane and that the price of biscuits is inhumane and asked themselves 'how did we get here?' 'how do we get back to a better place?' and will hopefully agitate again for a better society.

Swings and roundabouts.

>But I have the feeling that that well of constant culture wars has run dry,

Honestly, I don't believe that statement. I think many people equate the culture war issues to the issues later in that second paragraph with the economy and climate (if they even see an issue there). If our leaders are failing at [insert culture war issue here], then that explains why they're failing at [insert economic issue here].

I'm confused by your comment. First you call climate change a distraction; then you list it as something people are finally becoming aware of? The endless debates were to try and stop it. The population not being able to is just a reflection of the majority.

It's odd how people are trying to divide politics into "culture war" and real problems; it wasn't that long ago climate change was considered a culture war. Labeling something a "culture war" is just the first kneejerk reaction from the right when they appose something.

Creating a culture war is often the first reaction of the right to things they don't like in order to blunt their effect.

"loonie lentil eating lefties", "greenies", "mad Greta" (I'm making these up, but I'm sure I'm sure there's plenty of similar examples). People used to be comforted by these ad-hominems, and it allowed them to continue buying aspirational 4x4 off-road vehicles and 3 flights abroad a year without touching their conscious. They could laugh, share memes, ignore news stories about forest fires in Canada in December or massive loss of ice shelves in Antarctica and carry on as usual.

But as the pot starts to boil harder I get the feeling people are looking away from these distractions and beginning to look more critically at the information they're getting, and beginning to wonder if it's not such a funny joke after all.

So the culture wars are very interesting. The core of the the idea of a culture war is that class is divided by culture, rather than position in society.

You can look to old propaganda from the early 20th century in Italy and Germany where characters would speak to this. They would deny class lines based on wealth or capital holdings and insist the true class was defined by in and out cultural identifiers.

These culture wars we've been seeing are not organic. They're seeded by orgs that can make money off the outrage. It might be dramatic sounding to say, but the increasing prevalence of culture wars is indicative of the rising tide of fascism. Our societies have done a lot to weaken unions and redefine the meaning of class.

Because we redefined class boundaries to be cultural, we've created an artificial alignment, where say a working class queer urbanite and and a working class non-queer rural worker get shafted by many of the same mechanisms, but are seen to be in different stations because one has access to a bus and the other drives a pickup.

At the end of the day, material issues are what hurt people, but now the rural working class will blame the urbanite, rather than the capitalist that has strip-mined their town, and the urbanite will blame the backwards bumpkin rather than the capitalist that has strip-mined their city.

Since 1990, NYC rent has grown at 3.4%/yr, wages have grown at 3.4%/yr, and minimum wage has grown at 4.7%/yr.

Doesn't seem too terrible to me?

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CUURA101SEHA https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ENUC356240010SA https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/STTMINWGNY

While I wont argue pointlessly, I am curious what the median values look like for these stats.

In the US, averaging falls short due to said inequality. A smaller group of people have vastly increased wealth, while others stay stagnant. This moves the needle for certain statistics that don't give a full view of the issue.

Its easy to say "hey the average is fine" when you're talking about NYC where stock brokers and high end real estate really drags up that average.

From the 2020 census, the average income was 107k, where the median income was 67k.

EDIT: Seems the best metric is "avg rent burden", the ratio of median_rent/median_income.

It increased from 25%->27% from 2001-2024 [a].

Far from a catastrophe, though there is an upward trend since 1999 [b].

There are spikes upwards and downwards, and I'd guess the upward spikes make much better clickbait.

[a] https://cre.moodysanalytics.com//app/uploads/2024/02/image-1... , from [4]

[b] https://www.moodys.com/web/en/us/about/insights/data-stories...

Yeah, I couldn't find localize median wages, so I thought minimum wage would be a decent lower-bound.

Nationally, the easiest numbers to find are Wolfram Alpha's [1]:

Median wage (2001-2020): $27060 -> $46310 (2.9%/yr)

Mean wage (2001-2020): $34020 -> $61900 (3.2%/yr)

Bottom 10% wage (2001-2020): -> $18140 -> $27340 (2.2%/yr)

Mean->Median gap isn't too large, but the bottom 10% is pretty bad.

I think there was a temporary spike in rent burden [2] [3] which quickly reversed [4].

[1] eg: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=median+US+wage+2022

[2] https://www.moodysanalytics.com/about-us/press-releases/2023...

[3] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DP04ACS006037

[4] https://cre.moodysanalytics.com/insights/market-insights/q4-...

> "And yet they do interfere. We've seen plenty of evidence, from Russia, Iran, China and (I still can't believe how they got competent at this, but there you go) North Korea." (Emphasis; Mine - To single out the bit I'm replying to specifically.)

I still can't believe how readily so very many people continue to fall for it time and again, despite the lessons of history.

> I still can't believe how readily so very many people continue to fall for it time and again, despite the lessons of history.

“The bigger the trick, the older the trick, the easier it is to pull.”

“You believe it can’t be that old, and it can’t be that big for so many people to have fallen for it.”

Your answer seems a bit vague to me, so I can't follow what your objection is.

But just to be clear, my surprise at their abilities stems from the fact that their country is so insular, tightly controlled and technologically backward* (look at a night picture of N. Korea, for instance, 80% dark, with no basic streetlighting), that it surprises me that they can allow a portion of their society to roam and participate in the internet freely without infecting the rest of their country.

The Doublethink needed to pull that off must be staggering (thank you Orwell for giving us a vocabulary to express the concepts and experience of living under totalitarianism).

*I know they have ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons, also I'm pretty sure their internal surveillance tech is also top notch.

> the fact that their country is so insular, tightly controlled and technologically backward

A totalitarian country can invest billions of dollars from the federal budget into propaganda in another countries. You don't need technological supremacy to pour money into something. Tight cotroll and insulation makes the task easier, not harder.

> that it surprises me that they can allow a portion of their society to roam and participate in the internet freely without infecting the rest of their country. Isolation and elimination of infected individuals helps prevent the spread of the disease through hte population

Whatever marginal effect foreign interference has, it's almost certainly dwarfed by interference, or "lobbying", from domestic capitalists.

I haven't read much about the domestic capitalists and lobbyists attacking our critical infrastructure with cyber-attacks. Please tell us more about this.

They're the ones that cost-cut the operations of aforementioned critical infrastructure to the point of it being so vulnerable...

Just look at catastrophes caused by PG&E in 2018, ERCOT in 2021, or First Energy in 2003. Not a single one was caused by an attack on critical infrastructure, they're just cutting corners!

They don't have to, they just buy politicians that remove safety laws and break strikes against unsafe working conditions. The Ohio rail disaster was just one example of this happening.

This is certainly an issue, but apart from environmental legislation (e.g. please may I pump raw shit and tonnes of pesticide into public waterways) their main interest is at least in preserving public stability, general wealth and happiness.

Dictatorships though have a more macroscopically sinister agenda against successful democratic rivals.

Foreign interference is almost always bad and against the interests of national security. Lobbying on domestic policy actually has some important uses.

But most of these uses only favour few rich people.

Don't forget entertainment news (CNN, Fox, etc) who play no small part in dividing/destabilizing the country.

Can you give a tangible example where disinformation from China impacted any domestic topic in the US?

Sure, there is propaganda and attempts to influence certain topics, but I wouldn't want to give up privacy because I don't like some content on TikTok.

I think the divisions are of domestic origin and this argument is more or less FUD.

And no, you will hardly ever get rid of surveillance powers once established without serious political shifts.

Propaganda messages are quite easy and public. And yet I don't think you can name a single instance where such a message would have influenced the beliefs of a significant portion of the domestic population. If so, which message, what topic and who was targeted?

I think an example of propaganda is that you need to give up your freedoms for security because of "disinformation". A wrong statement on the internet became a threat to democracy.

>I think the divisions are of domestic origin and this argument is more or less FUD.

I agree, many divisions are definitely of domestic origin. However we definitely know that foreign interference has been at play to identify and amplify those divisions.

>If so, which message, what topic and who was targeted?

5G - weird one I know, but agitators gonna agitate.

Climate - Russia was a massive oil exporter, de-carbonizing efforts threatened that.

Atomic power in Germany - Russia definitely didn't want Germany achieving independence from their gas imports.

BRICS - China would love to de-dollarize the world.

>And no, you will hardly ever get rid of surveillance powers once established without serious political shifts.

And this is the advantage of democracies, big shifts can happen. With Dictatorships however it usually takes violence. A lot of violence.

5g? why would china be anti-5g? how is the whole BRICS thing propaganda or foreign interference (is NATO propaganda or just an association, don't even get your point since BRICS isn't even that organized)? I was on the fence but this response put me super firmly into the "this argument is FUD" camp

Do you think the alphabet soup doesn't do any propaganda?

Who dies for want of basic medicines?

Americans w/diabetes is one group.

We (I am one, though fortunate to have excellent insurance) really are not one such group.

https://www.healthline.com/health/diabetes/16-tips-to-help-y...

I am not a fan of the American healthcare system. Navigating it takes brains and effort that shouldn't be required. But if you have them it is essentially not possible to die here from lack of healthcare, and it's possible but surprisingly difficult to go bankrupt (except from lost wages, which is also a leading cause of bankruptcy in the UK).

> But if you have them it is essentially not possible to die here from lack of healthcare, and it's possible but surprisingly difficult to go bankrupt

That's a false myth.

https://www.quora.com/Were-there-any-American-citizens-livin...

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/nov/14/health-insur...

Yes, so this is where the brains and effort (and time, forgot time) come in.

The anecdotes in your links (that I read - can't get through all of them right now) have a common theme, which is that people died because they either needed very expensive and/or experimental treatment that probably would not be affordably provided to them under any plausible healthcare system, or else they got a bill, decided they couldn't pay it, and did without or tried to self-ration their healthcare.

The correct course of action in that case is to call the healthcare provider and negotiate A) a 90+% discount and B) a payment plan, both of which are pretty readily available in the American system. You have to know that's possible, and you shouldn't have to, but it is possible. Then you reach out to the charities, government programs, and/or nonprofits from my original link to cover what you still can't afford. Same deal if you get screwed by an insurance company as in the Guardian article.

This is, again, not something I'm trying to defend. It's not the way a sane healthcare system would run. But it is a system that works, more or less, for those who know how to work within it.

> The anecdotes

The anecdotes show that this is not an 'occasional' or 'edge case' thing but a systemic thing. The statistics show that at least 40,000 people die a year for not having enough money for healthcare and these are the people we know. The statistics don't include those who never go to the hospital to avoid risking medical bankruptcy for their families even if they die themselves. Just being in a hospital bed for one night without anything being done costs $3000/night, whereas waiting in the ER without anything being done can cost $100/hour.

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/woman-gets-688-35-er-bill-...

This is a systemic thing. Its not 'not a sane healthcare system'. Its literally a machine that kills people to maximize profit. And it became like this only because people let it and justified this or that other thing in the system.

> Just being in a hospital bed for one night without anything being done costs $3000/night

No, it doesn't. It costs whatever you can negotiate it to cost. I've been without insurance; one experience isn't data, but in my experience just telling the hospital you haven't got insurance is, again, good for 90+% off by itself.

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/10/28/you-can-negotiate-your-medic...

Hospitals (ed: non-profit ones, but I'm pretty sure similar rules apply elsewhere) in particular are required by federal law to have 'well-publicized' financial assistance policies.

https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/financial-assistan...

> Its literally a machine that kills people to maximize profit.

If that were true it would do a good job of maximizing profit. It's not even that good. Healthcare margins in the U.S. are 0.7%, which sucks. If you're the proverbial evil billionaire or whatever you'd rather own almost anything else.

https://www.nadapayments.com/blog/what-is-the-average-profit...

The whole reason I started this thread is because it bugs me when we attribute to malice what is obviously stupidity.

> It costs whatever you can negotiate it to cost

That's a really surreal proposition. People who are sick cannot 'negotiate' anything. People who are recently treated and are recovering from an illness are the same. Something that is life-critical cannot be up for negotiation to start with, but lets allow it for argument's sake.

What if you 'negotiate' and the hospital and the insurance company just reject? Do you have pockets deep enough to fight with their lawyers for years? Do you have the time? One person against corporate behemoths. That defies logic.

> If that were true it would do a good job of maximizing profit

It does. It keeps both the availability of doctors and hospital beds to create artificial scarcity. It does vertical integration and ensures that whatever you do in healthcare ranging from getting insurance to going to hospital, from medicines to secondary care stays within the corporate shareholdership network that owns the entire conglomerate.

> when we attribute to malice what is obviously stupidity.

The reason that the system gets away with murdering people for profit is that people attribute to stupidity what should be attributed to malice. If large corporations are killing people for profit like they are, malice should be attributed to the actions of all the upper echelons of the corporate world rather than any kind of incompetence.

> What if you 'negotiate' and the hospital and the insurance company just reject?

If you are sick and can't negotiate, and no one can negotiate on your behalf, or the provider won't negotiate, and if they sue, and if you have no charity assistance, then you will be one of the folks who goes bankrupt from medical bills. I said it was hard, and you can see from that chain of conditionals that it absolutely is, but of course it does happen.

The effects of bankruptcy in the U.S. last seven years, at least as far as credit rating is concerned. Not great, but this is not serious in the way that killing people would be serious, if that happened, which again, it basically doesn't if you can navigate the system.

> It does.

0.7% is an absurdly low profit margin. It just is. The rest of your paragraph is basically true, but doesn't change that. At the same time, the U.S. spends a much higher percentage of GDP on healthcare than most developed nations. Ergo, what the U.S. system is really optimized for is wasting money

Since that is not a rational goal for anyone, it's stupid. Evil at least achieves something for the evildoer. I'll leave it at that.

> 0.7% is an absurdly low profit margin. It just is. The rest of your paragraph is basically true, but doesn't change that. At the same time, the U.S. spends a much higher percentage of GDP on healthcare than most developed nations.

Where do you pull out that profit margin. The healthcare sector does vertical integration - they keep the patient inside their services - from insurance to hospitals - and milk them.

Your system is not inefficient. It is. The efficiency is for the shareholders. Not for you.

> Where do you pull out that profit margin.

From the link I provided.

> The efficiency is for the shareholders.

It's probably worth pointing out that some of the largest American insurance companies are mutuals. They don't have shareholders, or profits. Admittedly this is rarer in health insurance than some other kinds, but State Farm, for example, does a huge health insurance business and sends its excess revenue, if any, back to its policyholder-owners as dividends.

Insurance companies that do make profits do much better than 0.7%, but then imagine how much worse that means doctors and hospitals are doing in order to drive the average down that far. And this was originally about hospital bills. Americans with insurance don't typically get bills from the insurance company, just statements of what they aren't going to pay.

> The healthcare sector does vertical integration

Here you have a point. American antitrust hasn't been good for some time, and tends to be less effective on vertical than horizontal integration. Nevertheless, while I can't immediately find a number on what percentage of American providers are owned by insurance companies, I'm pretty confident it isn't high.

> just telling the hospital you haven't got insurance is, again, good for 90+% off by itself.

My understanding is that directly charging a different (higher) amount for insurance is considered to be fraud.

I'm not a lawyer and I've heard of more ridiculous laws than that, so quite possibly, but even if that's the case, I wouldn't think it would cover billing x and collecting 0.1x when you realize someone can't pay x.

And even if I'm wrong about that, when lacking insurance I didn't encounter a medical provider, including big ones with big compliance offices, who wouldn't do it. But others' mileage may vary.

> But if you have them

What if your problem is with your mental health?

It's not like mental health problems are fringe lately.

It feels to me like you're speaking as though you are in the middle of the bell curve, but from my perspective people who can navigate this system are an exception.

That whole EpiPen debacle springs to mind... I'm sure if you looked into it you'd find other examples of basic medicines being unavailable to large sectors of the population purely due to the cost.

There are many people that don't qualify for free health care (and some that do!) but can't afford co-pays and co-insurance, and must go without that medicine.

Can you tell me what portion of the population is covered by Medicaid? Give me a guess?

68k a year die in the US due to lack of medical. Poor people simply don’t visit the doctor.

The uninsured. The underinsured. People on the "wrong" insurance plan. People without the budget slack for $100s or $1000s per month for the medication they need. Poor people who don't bother going to the doctor to get needed prescriptions because they can't afford the initial visit. Rich people whose doctors fail to mention the drug that costs $250k because no past patients cleared for it could afford it. People going to the doctor who gets financial kickbacks from the inferior drug's drugmaker. People prescribed drugs that kill them.

If your question was actually serious, this is a non-exhaustive list.

When the GP said "basic medicines", they probably meant all the generic stuff that can be had without insurance for a few dollars; all the stuff that is on the WHO list of essential medicines[0], that is.

I'd venture that drugs that cost hundreds of dollars or more per month in the US are all cutting-edge stuff. I mean, sure, you have stories of people getting charged $10 for a pill of acetaminophen at a hospital, but that's a separate matter unrelated to the fact that you can get a bottle of 500 pills for single-digit dollars at your local Walmart.

> The uninsured. The underinsured. People on the "wrong" insurance plan.

Plenty to criticize about the US healthcare system, but let's remember that countries with nationalized medical care also suffer from their own ills, mainly in the form of long wait times. Ultimately, no place has enough doctors per capita that every sick person can be treated promptly and cheaply; so care must be gated one way or another. In America, you pay with money; in most other countries, you pay with time.

[0]: https://iris.who.int/bitstream/handle/10665/371090/WHO-MHP-H...

The WHO list of essential medicines is not just over-the-counter drugs. It includes things like the chemotherapy drug cisplatin. I happened to need that for testicular cancer ~10 years ago, and the treatment cost was $50k (as "payed" by insurance). That overall seems pretty reasonable to me for the treatment I received, but definitely not something I'd expect the median American to be able to pay out of pocket.

The median American would not have to pay out of pocket, as nearly every American has health insurance (since the ACA, it is actually illegal not to have insurance).

I think it's accurate to say that the median American is insured, with only 8% of the population uninsured [1]. Although, to put that percentage in perspective, that's 26 million people and likely thousands in excess mortality relative to the insured poplulation.

I believe you're referring to the ACA's "individual mandate", which imposed a federal tax penalty for being uninsured. I won't argue whether that makes it illegal or not, but I can say that the individual madate was eliminated by the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act in 2019 [1]. There's no longer a federal tax penality for being uninsured.

[1] https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/interactive/pe...

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5944881/

This is purely anecdotal, but of that 8% (26 million), I would posit that most of those people are uninsured by choice. e.g., probably mostly young, maybe part-time workers without chronic illnesses.

I find it amusing that people are basically advocating for the government to become every citizen's Medical Daddy (the GP of this comment) backed by the threat of state violence in a thread that is ostensibly about freedom from the security state.

My question is serious. The US Government spends $2 trillion per year for health care for the poor and the elderly, and also spends a significant amount for for tax credits for health insurance for those that are neither poor or elderly. Furthermore, hospitals always treat regardless of the ability to pay.

How many more $ trillions and how many fascist medical bureaucracies would achieve your ends comrade?

And yet they do interfere and are actively engaged in sowing dissent, discord, and wacky ideas by utilizing the power of social media. Your comment is at odds with reality. The rise of people being against something as obviously beneficial as the polio vaccine is an indication of just how powerful disinformation campaigns can be.

The reactance of those against vaccines had completely different sources. It wasn't China or Russia that are responsible here, far from it.

They of course noticed and certainly tried to reinforce that message, because they indeed became aware of the split. But the initial reason was a lack of trust in media and domestic politics and not some external propaganda channel.

And expect this to get much worse if you now increase surveillance. That said, NPR just suspended a journalist that did notice some form of propaganda from domestic sources, which might explain why people were distrustful in the first place.

In fact, you might be a victim of propaganda. Maybe read up on it.

The effectiveness of the polio vaccine has been demonstrated for many decades. That now polio is on the rise and the number of morons who are opposed to that vaccine is due to “propaganda”. State sponsored information warfare has taken what was once kooky ideas and spread them in such a way that a significant portion of the population buys into them.

It is wise for you too to read up on state sponsored disinformation campaigns. Obviously the U.S. and others are involved in such campaigns. Obviously the U.S. government and institutions like the NYT have collaborated to sell a version of events. For instance the NYT endorsing the invasion of Iraq.

The polio vaccine in particular had some hiccups where people got infected with polio due to insufficiently neutered pathogens in the past. Today the vaccine is created differently and this isn't a problem anymore. But still this is a reason why the vaccine might have a bad reputation in some places in the world.

That is has returned to developed countries has probably other issues instead of propaganda. But there aren't any propaganda campaigns in western nations that disincentive vaccination that would create the need for government to spy on your devices. These alleged propaganda campaigns would be easy to find, no? Since they target a broad audience?

You just can’t agree that being opposed to the polio vaccine is entirely idiotic. It’s amazing. It’s been an effective vaccine for over 50 years. There is overwhelming scientific and statistical evidence that it is a good thing and that it should be required. Being opposed to it is entirely moronic.

That people like you are willing to rationalize anti-vaccine sentiments on the polio vaccine is quite illuminating. And you suggest of me that I’m the victim of propaganda!

That is not the essence of any statement I had made, I recommend you read again.

You make the argument that because there are people believing X, we must allow the surveillance of our devices.

I have made no such argument. My original comment above was a response to someone saying that Russia/China don’t need to engage in what I call information warfare. My response was that they do engage in it.

And your first paragraph above was to rationalize why some people are opposed to the polio vaccine. You just couldn’t equivocally state that this is an example of people being duped into believing something that is entirely idiotic. It’s not the main point you are trying to get across but it’s worth addressing this since you suggested I might be a victim of propaganda. I think, in our exchange, you are more likely to be a victim of propaganda since you can’t just say, “yeah those people are being duped”.

China and Russia are not responsible despite actively enforcing the lack of trust of the people for their governments and authorities with disinformation. Got it, got any more gems to drop on us plebs?

No external force created the John Birch society that transformed into modern Trumpers. Its purely an American thing.

And, the investigations into election meddling ended with finding out that external forces spent some $100,000 on bad Facebook ads before the 2016 election. Not even a drop in a bucket. A simple blog network that the American conservative capital funds among the tens of thousands that they fund has more reach than such an ad.

What is even worse, even non-conservatives do it for money and make millions out of such activities:

https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2016/11/23/50...

Trump openly asked for Russia to hack the DNC. And they did so. Cleary Russia interfered in our election. I don’t blame them for doing so. We interfere in other nations’ elections but one should not deny the obvious.

> Trump openly asked for Russia to hack the DNC. And they did so.

Says the Democratic side. They are a party in the political fight in the US and they cannot be taken as an objective source. This includes all the 'inquiry committees' that are propped up in the congress and senate whenever the party that wants to persecute the other side has enough majority.

It's just a ROI calculation. A Russian fighter jet costs $25 mil, so a rational course of action would to weigh the benefit of buying another jet vs. buying a dozen congressmen, or flooding social media with misinformation to cancel a multi billion dollar defense bill for Ukraine.

When God was abandoned, money became the top object of worship. Is that experiment going well yet?

Which god figure are you referring to?

For example, Abrahamic religious leaders have made the concept of god toxic. But if you go by their dogma, then their god is responsible for the state of things.

Many of the non-abrahamic religions in the USA don't even have a god in the same sense, or they see their (equivalent to) god as the fabric of the cosmos and thereby not able to be abandoned.

I agree about the money though. It is the leading religion now.

It's easy to point fingers at "totalitarian regimes".

Oceania is always at wars for a reason.

    Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.

The true problem started with the promise of western lifestyle with a planet that can not support such a lifestyle, and it cant be taken back. And due to the assymetric destabilizing effects of advanced technology, we can not science our way out of this trap. So, we walk the middle road, augmenting society to better the angles of our nature with panopticons etc. while the planet still can carry us.

Gen Z can be the first generation with both improving living standards and a sustainable environment.

https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/hannah-ritchie/not-...

Planet could have easily supported this lifestyle for everyone on the planet in 50s but everyone else but developed nations started a mass reproduction race where population didn't just double but increased tenfold.

We don't live in democracies, but simulations of democracies. It's all about outward appearance.

Explain how you can have snowdens discussion and this thread in public? Doing the same critique of government policy in russia or china would get you disappeared real fast.

One possibility: You are allowed to have such discussions because these will be ineffective and forgotten within half a day while bringing about zero policy change. Most of us around the world do not know how to bring about a change in policy. Intellectual exchanges over such forums are certainly not the way.

It's funny that you mention Snowden, a person who exposed a whole lot of anti-democratic stuff going on in his own country and became a widely celebrated patriotic hero for his courageous work. I guess the people guilty of anti-democratic behavior went to justice, while Snowden himself was offered protection and a well-deserved respectable position to continue his fight for human rights. Just like other notorious human-rights activists like Manning, Swartz or Assange.

> became a widely celebrated patriotic hero for his courageous work

When leaks happened, traditional opinion polls seemed to show a 1:1 split on support vs. disapproval. Online polls seemed to show a 2:1 split, favoring support.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commentary_on_Edward_Snowden%2...

Seems like Snowden had to become a fugitive and seek asylum in a foreign nation to have his discussion. This is quite human.

It's just like how we can tell "Epstein didn't kill himself" joke online.

Because what we discussion doesn't really matter.

Sorry, you obviously don't live in a totalitarian country.

Democracy is never ideal, it's always full of crooks, lies, hypocrisy. Especially when most people have more interesting things to do than participating in politics. But it's not even close to anything totalitarian. I've lived in both, and have the perspective.

The person above didn't claim that? It's just the difference between ideal democracy where the interests of most people are reflected in policy and US democracy (and most others, to different degrees) where choice is limited and corporate interests weigh much more heavy, it's hard to tell if it's closer to a more openly top-down form of government than it is from the ideal.

Yet the person above didn't get arrested and tortured for that comment. Or for a wrong "like" on Facebook. I'm not exaggerating, it really happens every day.

Democracy is defined by direct or indirect control of government by people, not the presence or absence of coercion or how violent that coercion is.

This is not a binary choice. Both can be present. Both can be absent. The US arguably has a degree of both.

"Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."

Winston S Churchill, 11 November 1947

Every time someone disagrees with laws passed by a democracy, this argument comes back.

Did you ever speak with someone out of tech about internet spying? I did, no normie gives a shit. This is 100% the will of the people. Just take the L for what it is and accept that this is democracy working as intended.

Increasingly, the word "democracy" seems like the word "terrorist" - both words have lost any distinct meaning they used to have, because of the way they have been abused in political rhetoric.

Re. your handle: did you snag it from the Borges short story?

>Re. your handle: did you snag it from the Borges short story?

Yeah. I've read most of what he published. Even his poetry is great (El bisonte is one of my favorite poems).

I live in a democracy, but my country was totalitarian less than 30 years ago.

There is a big difference.

Western democracies had no interest in supporting democracies in other places they have been complicit in bringing down fledging democracies all over the the world the latest example is Pakistan. Democracy and Justice is only for themselves it also shows how Israel can commit the worse war crimes and atrocities and most western politicians and media defend it.

Pakistan has never been a democracy. The one went to prison was also elected by the army fyi. It's been like that since it's inception.

By the way there is nothing (no valuable resources) for outsiders to even get involved. Blame nobody but the Pakistani army for it's situation

That is false propaganda. He was allowed to get into power by the army but his government hobbled. He would have been in power in 2013 if clean elections had been held let alone 2018 he was not brought into power. He was not elected by the army and the latest elections has shown it

Reality: 's/Democracies thought that/Western techno-utopians believed, and feel-good politicians promised, that/'

I never got the sense that real grown-ups, who knew history, believed any such "the internet will topple" twaddle. Carefully-delivered truths (think Voice of America) can annoy and mildly undermine totalitarian regimes. If you want to do more - well, in WWII, British and American bombers dropped vastly more high explosives than information leaflets on the Axis powers.

Ultimately, authoritative regimes are supported by self-interest of key pillars of power (e.g. the military in Iran's case).

As long as an authoritative regime keeps these balanced against factions opposed to it, the regime can remain stable without popular support.

(Although doing so while running a functional and healthy economy is more difficult)

The definition of "the state" used to be "the entity with a monopoly on violence".

I think it has changed to "the entity with a monopoly on surveillance".

It's gotta be both because if you don't know who to brutalize you can have all the brutalizers in the world but not know how to use em. Look at how the Stasi operated, intel is crucial for maintaining control of a state.

I disagree, it is far from inevitable. I think this is a huge mirage. People believe others fall for propaganda en masse and fail to account for their own lack of critical thinking.

This is a typical fear reaction. "Disinformation" threatens our democracies, so we need to give up X and Y and allow government access to our most private devices and information.

It is wrong of course. And if we would ask for an example of a case of disinformation that did threaten democracy, we can wait a long, long time.

> to create enough propaganda to destabilize a democracy

Better explained by "Internet Fuckwad Theory" https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/greater-internet-fuckwad-theo.... It turns out anonymity isn't even necessary: attention is all you need.

Why is it that having one's own weapon turned against them never thought of as such a realistic outcome? Hubris?

Who needs outside interference when we have such opinions like yours at home?

Here's the democracy that you are living in:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/dec/29/fbi-co...

The capitalist West was not 'totalitarian' only because up until recently, it was possible to condition or distract the public through the corporate-controlled media. When the people gained the means to share information and organize and the corporate media was not enough to keep them down anymore, the system showed its true nature and stomped down the Occupy movement on the pavement. Sure, they did not jail them for their 'free speech', but they fined tens of thousands of dollars each for 'trespassing on PUBLIC property', effectively bankrupting many students, working-class activists etc, and sending a message to everyone else who 'had ideas'.

Some say that 'Angloamerican democracies are flawed of course'. The above is not flawed. Americans say that neither their vote nor their opinion has any effect on policy (~70%+ on polls each) leaving aside the recent research that shows it to be so, and when they try to change anything, they get what was done to Occupy done to them. Its not democratic

And for those who think that there is more freedom in Europe:

https://www.democracynow.org/2024/4/16/germany_palestine#:~:....

You have freedom as long as you don't disturb the ruling class or go against the incumbent foreign policy.

Please. PLEASE. can't we stop pretending that random russian/chinese bot do influence us? On twitter??? it's bullshit. Our media and friends are much more powerful.

It's NOT inevitable. Let's not be jaded. This law is terrible.

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