59percentmore

The federal government subsidized a planned, massive fiber build-out almost 3 decades ago. The telcos pocketed the money and then refused to complete the build-out, complaining that the last mile was too expensive. Municipalities pull teeth and the telcos have slowly rolled out to-home fiber piecemeal in the intervening years, as the local capacity to handle their extortionate rates appears. Alternatively, they will lay cable to your unconnected house/neighborhood for payments in the six- and seven-figure range.

Where we are is very much not a function of the free market.

You're being disingenuous. You clearly meant your anecdote to be representative, at least for "Canadians like [yourself]". But I suspect that it was meant to be a broader statement, and you're only backtracking now because the ridiculousness of that notion is apparent.

>I think either way both of us are in really good shape.

I'm lying in bed with non-specific upper abdominal discomfort that I'm hoping isn't related to digestive issues (pancreatic) that I've had for years, but which I can't get treated for because my insurance-related circumstances have made it very difficult to get consistent access to, and then to be taken seriously by, relevant specialists. These issues have combined with chronic injuries that were poorly managed in their acute phase and poor access to quality nutrition to make it difficult for me to exercise consistently. Contrarily and consequently, I'm quite out-of-shape.

The best and most consistent care I've ever gotten was while I was on Medicaid (which was still yet hampered by the professional stigma against accepting Medicaid and treating Medicid patients well).

>In my experience the quality of American care is better in nearly every regard (having experienced both pretty intimately

You experienced the quality of care available to rich people. That quality of care is not widely available, not for lack of institutional capacity, but primarily due to lack of profit.

>I’m confused

I really don't think you are.

That's a mischaracterization of the study. The very next sentence:

  However, the standard deviations indicate that there is considerable variation in how students allocate their time to these activities.

Additionally, their data is an "analytical sample" extracted via "weighted random selection" from a larger data set from more than 10 years ago. We don't know how well that sample fit the broader reality a decade ago, let alone today.

That you went fishing for research to support your argument and this is the best you could find is telling.

"I make $250k CAD a year, my experiences must be representative of, and relevant to, the masses," is a wild thought to have.

Well, maybe I spoke too soon, because my private American healthcare turns out to also be about 8% of my gross income (of $60k)(before copays and my deductible)(and also it's crap). Twinsies!

But yes I agree that it would be awful to have my health needs taken care of and a mere ~160k USD left to spend on everything else.

Semi-related anecdotes:

After the Civil War, when many plantation properties became economically unsustainable, occasionally the main house would be abandoned by the owners, and the remaining sharecroppers would take up residence; one house that used to be for one extravagantly wealthy family, now occupied by a handful.

In Newport, RI, after the income tax made maintaining grand Gilded Age domiciles untenable, many were subdivided into multiple units. Again, a house for one family (and there servants) turned out to be decent housing for multiple.

People keep saying that America has a building deficit, and to some extent, we do. But we also have a lot of physically massive houses that house one family, because those families can currently afford it. Historically, that has not been a permanent state.

And sometimes it's not even active destruction, just neglect. Public use amenities are subject to large amounts of wear-and-tear. Sometimes a thing just breaks, from someone being careless or not knowing how to operate it. You have to have the wherewithal for follow-through with upkeep.

I was going to say, "You might not have noticed, but it has been the 21st century for a quarter-century." However, you clearly did notice, so I'm not sure why you bothered to make this post. It's like you came to a conclusion, realized your empirical data was empirically out-of-date, but decided to press on anyhow. Rather than elucidate the subject, you just exposed your biases.

Things that are more expensive in the US for no reason:

  Healthcare

  Internet access

  College

sighs and adds "The very act of making a purchase"

At least we have cheap gas? farts

How hard is it for the wealthy to not smack everyone else around at every possible opportunity? What happened to noblesse oblige?

(This is not a rhetorical question, I would love to hear others' take on the psychology and history of the subject. Really, how hard is it?)

Went from 3 points up for 4 hours to 0 in the 5th.

It's always funny to me how threatened the sockpuppet brigaders are by small posts like this. They really can't stomach the idea getting even the littlest bit of traction.

Well, I'll say it again: capital redistribution is our way out of this. Our elite can stomach only owning one or two houses and businesses in exchange for saving the entire system from collapse.

The low-end millionaires run interference for the billionaires.

Regardless of who's actually at fault, if the low-end millionaires were to publicly and materially side with the remaining middle class, working class, poor, and indigent, their combined influence would be irresistable - which is basically what you said, I'll admit. But my point is that the millionaires are the last holdouts. Everyone else is ready to party.

If every American with a sub-8-figure net worth held back their property payments for 6 months, they could collectively have anything they asked for. Anything.

Ironically, the only way out of a volatility spiral (inflationary, deflationary, doesn't matter) is radical application of private capital to public good. Whether you're dealing with an economy that has locked up because of falling asset prices, or an economy that's insolvent because no amount of inflation can outstrip rising interest rates, the answer is to commandeer capital from those most likely to survive its absence so that it can be used to stabilize and make sustainable real production.

"But incentives."

The aftermath of this is an authority (still deriving its power from the will of the people) that's shown that it will keep you housed and with food on the table, and still able to access education and creativity and community and healthcare, and all you have to do is keep working like you always have and give up your exceedingly remote chance of one day being an oligarch or living on Mars. The elite are terrified that we'll realize how good of a deal it is.

M-M'

With what money?

Your defense of a system, and it's arbiters, who regularly put healthcare behind a wall of hundreds of pages of legalese is, "I'm not reading all that"? Be an adult, please.

>Regardless, I hope you find [...] a healthier set of ethics

That's my line.

Suffice it to say that you're not engaging with the comment because you can't. I at least appreciate your tacit acknowledgement that trying to do so while carrying through your selfish and irrational sentiments would be mutually exclusive with being a good person.

Can you imagine a conglomerate making up a third of the US GDP collapsing and US not being plunged into a multi-decade depression? Like, Wal-Mart shuts down and we're completely hosed. This was their AI bubble (i.e., massive and built on fraud), and they popped it ON PURPOSE, rode it out, and are barely worse for the wear.

We're doing something wrong.

To be clear:

1) Luigi is already a folk hero*, and the people whose boots you nibble are probably thanking their lucky stars that you're not the one sentencing him, as anyone with a brain will want to avoid decades of a "Free Huey"-style circus.

2) Does it occur to you that maybe I was intentionally speaking euphemistically, for your benefit?

Right, then. Let me be frank. We just buried a family member who died after 2 decades of his family fighting futilely to claw the treatment he needed out of the crapsack system that Brian Thompson helped preside over from his figurative cartel board seat. Many others - including myself - deal with chronic issues that are treatable or preventable in functioning healthcare systems. Unfortunately, ours is one in which Brian's buddies hold sway, and they've made it clear that their profits sit above all else (including, evidently, his own life, let alone ours).

Now, there is a world where I do not care about Brian Thompson. Where he's a teacher, or a firefighter, or an accountant, and I have no reason to know his name, and in August 2026, he is alive and living happily with his wife and children. It might even be a world where my family member, and thousands of other people, are still alive, because Brian Thompson did not take a job as a CEO of a health insurer.

We don't live in that world. We live in the one where Brian Thompson presided over a corporate regime that callously pen-stroked the deaths of thousands and thousands of patients who couldn't get the care that they needed, where HE CHOSE to be that kind of person with that kind of power and that kind of bloody track record. And the one where his successor stood over his grave and gloated about the double-industry-standard care denial rate UHC boasted under his tenure.

But also the one where rival Anthem dropped its planned anesthesia cap days after his death, and where the industry as a whole dropped its decades-long opposition to certain prior authorization reform provisions in the following year. And the one where talking heads got on TV to make sure us commonfolk knew that Luigi had done a very bad thing which they didn't approve of, indicating that our elite were feeling a real and manifest sense of danger, which your comments show continues to this day. In short, Thompson's assassination (and/or the public sentiment it unleashed) absolutely resulted in concrete and lasting change. There is zero doubt.

So, do I think that fabulously wealthy and well-connected executives should be held to account when they make reckless and cynical decisions that ruin and end lives? Do I think that this accountability makes the world a better place? Do I condone vigilante violence against such people when the government consistently refuses to investigate them, put them on trial, and put them in jail - and when the people themselves are made well-aware of the devastation their singularly influential actions have, and still they refuse to change, despite ample opportunity? Do I hope that this violence is targeted, with no collateral, and a limited-time deal because it forces sociopolitical change?

Uh.

Yeah.

At least, as much as we (we!) might condone the same for any other tyrant or despot. If you didn't cry for, I dunno, Gaddafi (fully legal position!), why cry for Thompson? And I notice you didn't say anything about Abe. You know, assassinated in broad daylight for allegations of misconduct that turned out to be true and, while legal, repugnant to much of the public? His was quite close to Thompson's situation, and you didn't even care enough to talk about or try to rebut my take on his case.

So I don't think your stand is principled. You don't care about denouncing an ontological evil, because you're supporting one. And I think the real reason that you're seething is because one of the implicit boons of wealth in America is supposed to be virtual immunity from being held accountable by people "below" you, and this incident shatters that illusion, and you really don't like it. It's merely selfishness on your part - if you want to talk about gross things and gross people.

But show me I'm wrong. Shed a tear for Mr. Pan-African Union and Mr. Moonie. Maybe throw in Kirk (or, if you're on the other side of the aisle, Hortman, though this is largely rhetorical as I can't imagine the kind of person you'd have to be not to see her death as horrific). In detail, please. And tell me what I should say to my family when they don't shed any for the woes of the suits who didn't care while our son/brother/nephew/uncle/cousin suffered. (I'll warn you that you'll have to be exceedingly eloquent in these regards in order to move the needle. Might as well not bother. Your energy is better spent helping to shape a world where simple broad prosperity and a functional social state precludes schadenfreude birthed from kinetic diplomacy, and accordingly you don't have to try to gaslight people out of it.)

*https://www.isdglobal.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/Picture...

I'm curious what the implication of this blatantly false* statement is.

*At the very least, you have to worry about Jackie Chan "borrowing" your wheels for a wacky chase scene. Based on my knowledge of Hong Kong cinema, this must happen at least once per week. Dude is a menace and a fiend.

See, that's where you're wrong. Their main responsibility is preventing a violent attack. At least, according to the people who set the agenda and policies for frontline employees. Faulting "rude" employees is futile; even when you have legitimate reason and desire to correct their behavior, do you sit there and negotiate with the scanner operator? No, you go to their boss. So, who is responsible?

Whether or not you want to face it, those events forced the institutions involved to reexamine their behavior, and the result was a handful of pro-consumer/pro-citizen decisions.

Make things better for people before they get that bad, and you won't have to read such "gross parentheticals" (or worse).

Ironic.

And, to be clear, it's a crappy job. Get up ungodly early to travel to a work site in the middle of nowhere to shepherd thousands of jumpy/tired strangers* through arcane procedure (possibly in a language that they don't exactly have a firm grasp of) in the hopes of catching the one-in-a-million who has shown up specifically with the intent to kill you and as many other people as possible (or so your training says).

All while gaining basically no transferrable skills.

*Also, a significant portion of these strangers are headed to destinations and experiences you could never dream of affording or having the opportunity to access.

There was a focused effort to "professionalize" the hobby by researcher (crank) John Forester. Thousands of cyclist deaths can be attributed to his efforts, which included promoting "serious" cycling over accessible and casual transport, and personally destroying early plans for widely-available bike lanes in California a la in the Netherlands. Though not as infamous, you can think of him as a mini Moses.

This shouldn't really be directed at people who work at the airport. Almost everything mentioned is the fault of the people who designed the airport and the people who run the airport.

The latter group are so, so happy that you addressed the former, and not them. They have successfully avoided the inconvenience and scrutiny that would prompt them to change. (Of course, between Abe and the UHC guy, taking your complaints directly to an executive also seems to be effective, if not even more so.)

The same reason you might scream out loud to no one in particular instead of just thinking it in your head.

It depends. Does fining someone 99% of their income make it impossible for them to live with basic dignity? There are many, many people for which it wouldn't, especially if you limit to W2 income (as so many income-based tests do).

I've long been of the opinion that the focus on "how much is being taken" is wrongheaded, and pushed primarily to advantage elites. What about, "how much are you left with?" Now, suddenly, it's in their best interests for the popular understanding of "enough to live on" to be quite high.

If we're talking perverse incentives, we are currently living in a regime worse than many of the alternatives.

In the past, it has been humorously and falsely attributed to a Final Fantasy game.

I just saw an ad for Instagram's teen features, aimed at parents. You can't advertise for your product and then say that people are using it of their own volition. We are right back to the 90s and Big Tobacco.

Making a statement like this puts every other in which you appeal to objectivity in question. Where it's not so broad that it says nothing, it's trivially falsifiable. I read it as a passive-aggressive concession from someone who knows that they're wrong but can't admit it.

>Do you believe that the same government people that is influenced by lobbying is going to vote to close the ways in which corporations give them money to control their decisions? How could that happen?

I just told you.

>Tyrants believe that they know what's reasonable for the people to do with their lives, and as is often there case a lot of people don't agree with them, so then they use force to coerce people to do what they will.

All of that is true. And it has no bearing here, because we're not talking about tyranny. A society that redistributes wealth because the redistribution of wealth has been proven to promote a healthier society (along objective metrics) is not suffering from tyranny, no matter how much you, personally, feel like you've been wronged. That sense may very well be disordered. A million people shouldn't have to suffer because one person is aggrieved that his advantages were stripped. In this case, your aviation is a confession, and you're the one promoting tyranny.