-14 karma · joined August 14, 2019
This story has been told at least dozens of times now in the last two decades in particular and ever time it is some combination of a scapegoat excuse and ... of course, climate change done done it! ... when in reality it was an utter failure of leadership to not notice the shifting enemies on the battlefield or being able to adapt to those changes ...
Sears/Kmart, WalMart (even though they are trying), all the book stores (even though B&N is putting up a good fight), ToysRUS, Taxi services, etc.; even, arguably, the whole US economy that is now realizing that "holy shit, maybe we shouldn't have bet the farm and slaughtered that golden goose so the ruling class or fools could get rich quick by selling their own people out to China/India.
They are all cautionary tails of hubris ... nothing more, nothing less ... regardless of how little people want to learn from them.
On the other hand though, in the absence of and the externalization of the costs by not holding corporations and professionals responsible for their actions, it can be argued that it falls into the common good scope of government to provide such emergency services that are generalizable across the population and from which everyone will equally benefit and therefore can also not be extracted.
There is also an argument to be made though that this has been known and Thomas Cook has been on the skids for years now, even though a layperson really can't be expected to know that when they dish out their life savings to book family vacation of a lifetime.
Again, there reckless corporations need to be held to the fire on these matters, which is EVEN MORE the responsibility of government ... the core responsibility at that ... so that it doesn't have to do these types of things because the reserves existed that would allow emergency travel or relocation or whatever is needed to meet contractual obligations.
You may claim "is much cheaper", but reality is that you just don't know and are not being told the full cost of what you are being forced to pay for.
I don't know what you think you are explaining to me, the USA also has a public and private retirement planning system, and again, AUS is not exactly as bad off as Europe; but reality is that you don't see the freight train that is barreling down on you. The thing that makes the USA, AUS, and EU very very difficult to compare for even the supposed experts, is that there are so many modulating variables. Not only are they variables, but they qualitatively modulate things. For an example, you think your system works great in AUS and you have lower taxes and a public health care system that works ... what you don't consider, intentionally ignore, or are propagandized not to even be able to take in; are things like the fact that you don't have huge populations that drain the life, energy, focus, and money out of the USA by the billions. For example an estimate of the cost of various existing welfare programs in the USA ... not ones where you even get something at overpriced and inefficient rates like universal healthcare ... costs the American tax payer approaching the amount of the whole GDP of all of Australia. Think about that, the money equivalent of work, energy, and focus of the whole Australian economy, what every single man, woman, and child does in the economy; goes towards welfare programs to support people that are drains on society. They are even largely not only not contributors to society, spending a whole life of being a net overwhelming negative contributor, but increasingly they are not even American citizens that are draining the country.
The point is, you can sit there and chide big mean America for not providing health care, while also not having any idea what you pay for that, nor the overwhelming cost it would be to take care of everyone in the USA, in addition to the fact that you take for granted that the US tax payer funds the protection that keeps China from a full on invasion and even allows you to engage in free trade at the American tax payer's expense. And all that while you spit in American's face. Reality is that none of this math makes any sense or adds up in any manner when all the full accounting is done. Do you want to pay for the health care pampering of someone that chose to get morbidly obese while you lives healthy and saved your money instead of buying food with it? Reality is that if the USA were to adopt some universal healthcare system, it would bankrupt the USA and trigger a global economic collapse as all the fools don't realize just how dependent they are on the USA, and then they would also find themselves without the massive military that keeps them safe from others more than willing to conquer them when given the chance. Choices have consequences, my friend, and I do not think you have the ability to recognize the precarious situation the world is in as types like you keep sawing at the branch you are sitting on.
An old, irrelevant, outdated document the Constitution is, they tell you as part of the psychological manipulation game they play to get people to foolishly abdicate their most fundamental rights through the con job of government's benevolence. But in the end, well beyond the point of way-too-late, people will unfortunately have to come to terms with the reality that freedom, liberty, self-governance, and that the government is no one's friend are not old, irrelevant, and outdated principles; they are universal principles that span time.
Just like many things in humanity have been discovered and crated, then forgotten and taken for granted and driven to being lost and collapsed, and then rediscovered or reinvented; so too, does it seem humanity is on course to bury this experiment with self-governance that was kicked off in 1775, for maybe another 1,000 years, if not permanently. Is there even an opportunity or chance for freedom to rise again when it is suppressed so thoroughly by way of technology and soulless robots and AI? I think not. I hope I am for once wrong. ... War or galvanizing event to rationalize ever more eradication of liberty, incoming, all to the cheers of adoring fans.
In memoriam the people who's voices have been squelched by the tech tyrants. They will not be the last victims of this evil that is descending on us with ominous persistence.
You are looking at it wrong (to be direct). You can get all the health insurance disconnected from employment you want just like any other self-employed and independently affluent people get. It's there, freely available to you. No one is stopping you. Ironically, you can even get that insurance when you are employed, even though you will literally pay a massive penalty for being employed by doing so in the form of the unrealized and hidden cost of the un-utilized employer contribution to the health care cost, which you would then have to pay out of pocket on top of that. (tip, if you want to decouple health insurance from employers, go for the tax advantages of providing health insurance plans ... which touches on the origins of this damn mess caused by the do-gooders fools that demanded employers provide health care in the past).
The real problem is a perception issue that people do not understand the true nature and cost of health insurance/care which also leads them to not understand that their employer puts up many times more in health insurance costs than the premiums the employee pays every month. The problem is a perception problem, and a health care cost problem at its core, and the employment dependency issue is really just a secondary issue that is utterly meaningless.
What does it matter whether you could sever and ban employers from even offering health insurance under a glorious socialist authoritarian regime while racing towards communist demise? Does it matter whether you pay $200 and your employer pays another $700 every month in premiums, or instead your employer simply just adds another $700 to your paycheck per month and you pay the full $900 for health insurance every month out of pocket? All other things being equal, I argue it's the same thing, because math.
Reality is that it's a cost issue that directly is derived from a corruption issue. For example, before the government committed fraud, aka, stole, and handed the health sector (insurance and care) trillions of dollars in profits through the ACA, aka Obamacare, (do not believe me, confirm it yourself if it makes you uncomfortable that I am questioning your messiah Obama, just look at the health sector stock market pre and post ACA [1]), which is one of the sources of corruption that has driven the cost of health care up from (single person example) ~$100/$500 employee/employer split cost for health insurance before ACA to ~$200/$700 post ACA.
The other corruption that has been driving up health care costs and therefore defrauding people is (which his true, regardless of whether one is able to accept it or not) due to the millions of "immigrants" both "legal" and illegal, that have been transported into the USA to defraud the American citizens that are part of the 99%, which put massive amounts of load on the health system with ailments, diseases, and conditions; many of which were essentially unknown and/or eradicated in the whole of the western world before just a few years ago.[2 (which is not quite the full extent but a thread that can be pulled on if one wants] When citizens who are being financially enslaved to pay for the health care of millions of "immigrants" from the third world with degenerative diseases and conditions, it is going to cost and that cost will always be and it is going to cost in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions per individual. And no, that is not an exaggeration. The information can be relatively easily uncovered even though I do not have the ability to pull it up right now for citation.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2016/07/28/overwh...
[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2018/02/26/how-am...
Amazon Will Cut Health-Care Benefits for Nearly 2k Whole Foods Employees
I am guessing that due to the food perspective of the blog they focused on the Whole Foods aspect of the story, but this is clearly a dystopian corporation story, not a grocer story.
It is one of those rather notable regrets that I did not save that video, even though it clearly struck me to recall it all this time. If I recall correctly, it was a seemingly impromptu talk outside in the open either at a charity or corporate socializing event. It was definitely not in some venue, let alone in a large one where he's basically parroting corporate talking points. Which may also explain the candor and seemingly single mention of his intentions that has stuck with me all this time.
There are some people who try to provide alternative accurate information to the government's data, and it consistently shows far less rosy numbers that also match the historical record far closer.
The real reason for the remaining increases are probably a combination of domestic Chinese pressures and the inflation machine Obama started and Trump has only continued both starting to grip and people are starting to notice as articles like this point out things that have been going on for a decade now.
The people lauding the wonderful beautified “universal healthcare” (which, btw, they lied to you about never wanting to implement during pre-Obama care con job that made the Health sector rich and the middle class poorer) do t ever actually account all the costs when discussing it, and I will just assume you are doing the same from a point of ignorance, and not intentional deception.
Here is a representative example of a wonderful splendrous worker with universal healthcare in Europe.
1), as surveys here too show, for the same job, you’ll be making about 50-75% the salary of an American equivalent (see following points).
2) Your tax burden on that immensely lower income will be approaching 30% effective income tax (FYI, e.g., the 42% tax rat starts applying at €55,000, just for a reference point … and no, that is not a typo)
3) on that lower income and higher taxes amount, you then get to pay huge retirement taxes too, on the order of effectively approaching 20%, with heart wrenching and soul sucking outcomes when you see the “pension” people are given after a life of paying into an utterly incompetent and failed retirement system. For reference, think of paying into a retirement system at going on 20% of your income and then getting about 1/4 of your salary to live off in “retirement”. It’s sad and sick and immoral. If people had been able to simply invest their own money in a global fund, they would probably be swimming in money in retirement, but instead they were pillaged and plundered in order to give them a pittance in “retirement”. It’s really a morally bankrupted and depraved system.
4) so now that we’ve reduced your already lower income by around 50% from taxes and a con job retirement system, let’s talk about the health care system cost that will run you about €300 per month in employee costs every month just for a single person, not counting the employer contribution of another ~€900; again, for a single individual. And on top of that, you are also going to have copays to see the doctor (albeit about 1/2 to 1/3 of the cost in the USA, so you get to save $5-15), but you also get to go to a doctor for a prescription and a pharmacy to buy things like basic over the counter medications like ibuprofen .… that comes in blister packs of 20 you get “for free”(see tax burden and health insurance costs above for reference of level of “freeness”). Again, no, those are not typos or errors, they are very much representative examples.
4) gasoline is taxed at 100%, in most European countries or more, with talk of increasing it. And no, again, that is not a typo. For reference, in the USA gasoline is taxed at around the 20-25% range. The reason I mention that, is because it’s not only a taxation on mobility, it again sucks the disposable income of the lower income people dry.
And none of that even goes into the fact that medical care is determined by the insurance that pulls typical insurance things where when it’s time to pay out all the sudden the medical care is deemed not necessary.
The saddest thing about the health care cost debate is that it seems to be driven by a con job to trick people into a trap that will enslave them to authoritarian control even more without any benefits from it, if not only more detrimental effects like Obamacare that only served to drive up costs and then peg them at new levels that made health insurance companies and the medical sector richer, while Medicare fraud and pull pushing has run amok.
I actually find it curious that especially this community would not realize that the ideal system is not a centralized monolith running on a con job and no backups, but a highly competitive decentralized system forced to be transparent and accountable. But I guess whatever is driving the centralization of power and control among the tech tyrant FAANGs, seems to have also latched onto people’s minds here maybe.
Please excuse any errors because English is not my first language
If you’re billing at $300/hr and working when and how you want, it actually seems immensely disingenuous to try to associate with the sympathies for people stuck in the gig economy con job the tech tyrants have been imposing on society as a kind of excuse why you couldn’t manage to fill your consultancy pipeline.
I also guarantee he could have gotten health insurance, he just did not feel comfortable paying the roughly $1,000 to $2,000 per month it would have cost because his business pipeline was not full of work consistently.
People don’t realize just how much health care costs, regardless of whether it’s American employees who don’t realize the employers contribution is about 4-5 time what they pay monthly, or the worshiped and beatified “universal healthcare” that is “free” in Europe where massive taxes are paid to augment the also massive individual monthly cost taken out of people’s paychecks.
Think of an Amazon shopping competitor that has a great site UX and actually makes good recommendations (no, Amazon, I do not need 20 more variations on lightbulbs I just bought), the site UX and recommendations, among other things; would surely have to cumulatively far exceed the perceive value placed on the immediacy of AMZ logistics operation that can have you the thing you lust after on the same day sometimes.
I’m certain AMZ knows quite well, just as Google, FB, etc., they have a monopoly of Good Enough in core competencies to both maintain their monopoly and stave off or at least frustrate competitors through their monopolization of our minds. It’s a new type of monopoly, Mental Monopoly, suited for the Information Age abstracted from the physical world of goods.
It’s why we suffer through Amz, Aws, as well as put up with google and YouTube and fb and endless scrolling through rubbish on Netflix … they have a grip on our lazy mind because they’re all Good Enough and there is no one that is enforcing comptmltition in a manner that is appropriate for thevtech industry.
After all, if no one notices good deeds, they don't count, right? It's the currency liberal American runs on, Virtue Signals ... V$.
Case in point beyond just their close relationship and integration into censorious and authoritarian Google and Youtube, look for a link to the official government report on the definitely not muslim Bataclan attack in Paris, which details the gruesome slaughter, torture, disfigurement, dismemberment, and torment the attackers perpetrated upon their victims; which was all of course withheld from the public until it was forced into the light by the court case. You will not find a link to the report in spite of it being out for many months now, and you will be unsuccessful at adding a link to the report, let alone highlighting the brutal descriptions from the several hundred pages long report, somewhere in the wikipedia page.
It's full on censorship, and the most pernicious and nefarious and sick part of this digital censorship is that deletion, shadow banning, banning, or simply colluding across organizations to erase someone's digital personality and identity goes basically unnoticed by the general public that is none the wiser that someone was ushered off to the digital gulag or digital mass grave ... pooof ... that comment, information, person is gone, with not trace and no accountability or transparency.
Google has 0 incentive to actually introduce privacy, let alone anonymity or Constitutional rights to free speech.
But ALL the incentive to undercut and take out all the actual efforts to redistribute the web and introduce real freedom and privacy and allowing humans to have the rights they already have and which government does not have the right to curtail or allow the curtailment of in any way (as outlined in the Bill of Rights); regardless of whether the tyrants keep trying to ever increasingly tighten the noose they have slipped over our neck at this point.
No need to try to flee or put your efforts into redistributing the internet, citizen, see, we are providing all you need here on FAANG Ranch.
In Europe, generally speaking the government is largely dominated by the legislative today (whereas it was dominated by the aristocracy prior to WWI, generally). In the USA, the Constitution explicitly separates the Legislative of making the rules/laws; and the Executive, the enactment of the rules/laws ... the rule making and the acting body of the government. That is a notable difference from Europe where the lines are not drawn as clearly and the military, the body generally charged with security the health of the society, is subsumed and subjugated to the legislative, not at all on equal corollary to the government bureaucracy the way that it stands in the USA, where the military is not a body under the legislative the way it generally is in Europe, but rather an equal part to the Executive, acting body.
It's quite a nice balance actually in terms of preventing military control, while also not suppressing the self-preservation requirements of a healthy society the way that has been done in Europe, largely intentionally. It's a larger topic in and of itself, but the artificial suppression of both military and social self-preservation in Europe was very much the reason that the USA (mostly) has been serving as a kind of paternalistic helicopter parent over Europe, because the transatlantic aristocracy has intentionally and artificially suppressed Europe's health, immune system, and therefore basic human self-preservation instincts.
It's a great tragedy actually, and may one day be recognized as the great atrocity it is, a kind of national Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy, which will only result in Europe suffering the invariable grave consequences from such actions, be it total vanquishment, conquest, and occupation of their societies by foreigners in a kind of civilizational implosion we only know from the history books, or some other erratic outcome from a backlash against actions that have very much predictable equal and opposite reactions.
It's really not a health or even all that smart community once you start thinking about it. It's almost like the Apple Card is a kind of peak travesty ... a card made of titanium (think about that), that has cleaning and care instructions, that has such sharp edges that it is cutting people; not to mention that it's a credit card, a signal that would tell people in a healthy society that "this person does not know how to manage money and therefore has to borrow money for basic daily things". The use of a credit card for anything but mid tier level purchases or where the secondary/ancillary benefits are useful, should make one not trust such a person for their inability to manage their finances. Think about it, credit to buy dinner and/or drinks. It should be a clear sign of untrustworthiness.
Yes, I realize that credit cards offer and obscure the reality of the matter through ancillary benefits that I also utilize on occasion. Those are not there though as the primary purpose of the card, they are there to obfuscate and obscure and mask through justifications and rationalizations, the use of the real reason that the financial institutions want you to use the cards, the credit feature that will rack up profits that are then also rolled into the cost of the goods you purchase. People don't realize that every credit card purchase drives up the cost of goods and services, especially due to the contractual agreements of payment processors that prevent different prices for card over cash use.
At the heart of it all, the whole credit card industry is a kind of con job monopoly by the very definition of the term: "an act or instance of duping, swindling, or persuading by deception." or a "trick of confidence", imbuing the target with confidence (in this case by tapping into the odd apple fan boy confidence through the shiny titanium apple card) in order to dupe them into using the credit card that will result in interest and fees and conversion arbitrage profits over n% of charges and balances; and all that through the forced monopoly of contractual limitation of competition of cash transactions.
I don't know about you, but if the free market/competition were not limited by this cartel of colluding payment processors (MC/Visa, mostly) I would use cash/debit if it meant I could save money (likely more than the cash back amount offered on credit cards). But that's precisely why they limit competition by cash
On a side note: This makes the thumbnail for TechLead's video review of the Apple card that much funnier (it's the card slicing through a steak)
It has been disconcerting to me for a long time now, even back when I was told that I do not know how the internet works when I foresaw the very outcome we are currently in, back about 20 years ago now. What has really happened here, is a kind of fascism (the alignment of state and industry) not by the grass roots so much as it was approached in the past, but through a top down consolidation, concentration, and now ever increasing and tightening control over all aspects and manners of freedom and liberty, under the guise of doing things for others' best interests, which of course always align more closely with the interests of the power seeking than the blissfully unaware recipients of this benevolent good intention of the power hungry.
I do not foresee a positive future at this point, because the very mindset of the trend curve has solidly crossed with the power broker curve, and there is ever weaning realization that the only way to resolve these matters in anything but a violent manner is that everyone be allowed the God given rights that the US Bill of Rights (the first 10 amendments to the Constitution) prohibits the government from violating.
Those include free speech and assembly (of any kind, regardless of whether you agree with it), freedom to arms to protect yourself from the very government mob that demands to take the right to protect yourself from it (it's a self-fulfilling and self-validating argument that is rather genius), and other inalienable rights that are innate to actual Americans (and anyone who were to adopt the same) and God given (which you presumably should not and do not prescribe to if you do not believe in God from which they are unavoidably and declaratively derived) that are not necessary to be listed here for reasons of brevity and their only tangential relation to the topic.
It has always surprised me, and it is one of the most interesting questions for me, how that a presumably extremely logical and systematic cohort of humans as the ones assembled in this forum, would seemingly lack any semblance of a capacity to understand the consequences of making fundamental changes to a system, in what appears to be some bizarre and inverted assumption that no change to a system will in any way result in negative outcomes. Unless of course the very prime assumption is a desire to sabotage the system, whether you are a knowing and willing participant, or just a placed saboteur ... a rube, not in any way understanding that he was placed to spread his negative impact on the system from within.