which is why big blue states like California and Illinois and Massachusetts and New York also refuse to implement the far more efficient and equitable public health reforms common to countries in Europe with much smaller GDPs.

Those states do have a lot of benefits for low income families when it comes to healthcare that red states don’t offer.

But a big reason they don’t do universal healthcare, aside from billions of dollars in insurance and healthcare capital lobbying politicians, is because you need all the neighboring states to also be on board as well. Why would it be beneficial for me to have universal healthcare if I live on the state border and work in another state? If I get hurt and I need to go to the ER in the other state that doesn’t have universal healthcare, I’ll be super screwed when the bill finally hits. I bring this up because people in the US travel between states quite often.

But aside from that, I’d argue the biggest issue is that even though California and other blue states have large GDPs, they don’t usually have much money to spare. The fact that the Federal takes so much money from regular people in addition to State taxes, it wouldn’t be feasible to offer universal healthcare without buy-in at the national level.

The simple fact is, the healthcare system is broken. Costs are so high because they’ve been able to get away with it due to millions of people throwing money into insurance and not needing to use their insurance the majority of time outside of routine appointments. As a result, these companies had billions just sitting around and for-profit hospitals knew this. As such, it’s become a greedy race to the bottom.

A typical surgery even 40 years ago would not drastically hurt anyone financially. Yes, technology and medicine has drastically improved, and correct me if I’m wrong, but fixing a basic broken bone hasn’t changed much in the last 50+ years. So why does getting a broken leg fixed now cost thousands of dollars when it used to only cost maybe a couple hundred?

Greed, is my conclusion.

The rich people live in non-polluted areas.

I think this is a large amount of the issue, along with what others have commented. There literally is.a hostile sentiment towards the “common/greater good” in the US if it means individuals have to sacrifice even a modicum of inconvenience. COVID and asking people to mask up was a perfect example of it in action. And that wasn’t even entirely a democrat vs red hat cult thing, though the cultists definitely were much more pissed off and loud about it.

Whenever I’ve rented from Enterprise here in the US, they explicitly do not charge you for simple scuffs/scratches that aren’t deeper than a specific amount (like 0.5cm or something).They’ve always told me they don’t charge for dents that are smaller than around 2-4cm in diameter. In other words, basic wear and tear on cars being used by hundreds of people over their rental lifespan.

If Hertz ultimately goes down this path and their competitors do not, I would almost guarantee they’ll lose tons of business.

Flock also said it launched a new tool that blocks impermissible searches in real time. “If a search involving Illinois camera data includes terms that indicate an impermissible purpose under Illinois law, the Illinois data will automatically be excluded,” the company wrote.

Lol, I feel like this can be easily sidestepped. ICE and the other fascist fucks enabling them don’t give a shit about laws anymore. They can easily just change the purpose of their search to be one of the legally permissible reasons. Flock is supposedly working on a tool to automatically flag suspicious searches, but I doubt they’ll work hard on ensuring it’s effective.

As much as I am loathe to abandon this kind of tech to help find missing/kidnapped persons/human traffickers, it’s way too easily corrupted when law enforcement is actively hostile to citizens no longer viewed favorably by the regime.

They never said Win 10 would be the last ever. That was an off-handed comment made by one of the developers during an interview that the media spread as an official Microsoft statement, which it wasn’t.

And yes, MS said the EOL was October 2025, but anyone that’s familiar with any of Microsoft’s previous software sunsets know that they always offer paid extended support. For example, Windows Server 2012R2 was sunset in what, 2023sh? But they offer paid extended support up to sometime in 2026.

They’ve always said that extended support would be available. It’s like this with every single enterprise product. Red Hat Linux, VMware, etc all do it.

I’m all for circle jerking against Microsoft, they fucking suck. But this particular example is just such a dumb thing to get on a soapbox about. Businesses can’t be expected to indefinitely support a piece of technology for free. Some Linux distros can do it because people volunteer their time and skills to do so. But that isn’t feasible for a business to just pay dozens of developers to continuously work on a product that isn’t actively pulling in revenue.

Calling people dumb for using an insanely popular product is pretty unnecessary. Some grandma just playing solitaire on her old PC that she uses to pay bills and whatnot on and you walk by, “you dumbass, use Linux instead!”

So all your users are working on Macs or Linux? That’s an impressive accomplishment for an enterprise scale work environment.

Are you referring to this photo?

Yes, he is definitely “groping” her here… Jfc.

And the kissing thing was definitely unacceptable, but hardly worth the amount of scandal it received.

She said Franken, a former “Saturday Night Live” cast member and liberal activist who was elected to the Senate in 2008 and won a second term in 2014, insisted on rehearsing the scene backstage.

“He said to me, ‘We need to rehearse the kiss.’ I laughed and ignored him. Then he said it again. I said something like, ‘Relax Al, this isn’t SNL. … We don’t need to rehearse the kiss’,” she wrote in a lengthy and detailed post on KABC’s website.

“He continued to insist, and I was beginning to get uncomfortable.”

Tweeden said she reluctantly agreed to rehearse the line leading up to the kiss and that’s when Franken “came at me, put his hand on the back of my head, mashed his lips against mine and aggressively stuck his tongue in my mouth.”

“I immediately pushed him away with both of my hands against his chest and told him if he ever did that to me again I wouldn’t be so nice about it the next time,” she said. “I felt disgusted and violated.”

Franken, through a spokesperson, responded: “I certainly don’t remember the rehearsal for the skit in the same way, but I send my sincerest apologies to Leeann.”

Edit: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/sen-al-franken-accused-forcibly-kissing-groping-woman-n821381

I will add that the GOP also amplified the issue 100x. The fact that Trump of all people was tweeting out against Franken is peak hypocrisy.

Chuck Schumer fucking sucks.

I know times are hard, but you could build/find a PC for <$300 that doesn’t run that badly. Hell, even a ~$150-200 tablet would be way better than that.

This. YouTube is extremely helpful for anyone who can’t afford to take their stuff to a repair service or hire someone to fix something at their home. Just a few months ago, I thought my washer was done for, but it turned out to be a super simple fix that no website mentioned except for a super obscure YouTube video with only a couple hundred views. Saved me hundreds of dollars. There’s countless other anecdotes like that over the years.

This is what sucks so much about Google’s monopoly. I truly wish a cooperative of governments and/or academia created a publicly funded alternative as well as hosting an archive of YouTube on it. It would of course need to be administered by a non-partisan committee made up of representatives from multiple countries that had numerous safeguards against governmental political censorship. Hoping for a grassroots alternative is a lost cause, as the hosting and administrative expenses are just way too cost prohibitive, so publicly funded is the only solution I can see as being plausible

I agree it isn’t fair for others to put the ante on those that are sick, but I think your response is also unwarranted. The fact of the matter is, we all have something to lose. That’s the primary thing keeping mass civil unrest at bay. I will attend protests and vote, but I sure as hell am not going to start shooting bullets at politicians in the vain hope it’ll change anything while subsequently resulting in me going to jail for the rest of my life.

The problem is, nothing short of NA and EU governmental intervention will force Google to stop being such a nefarious, monopolistic, antitrust piece of shit. They’re just so utterly ubiquitous for Western businesses. You cannot have a small business* and hope to be successful without partaking in either Google or Facebook/Meta’s ad services. TikTok was becoming a huge threat to both those companies and look how viciously they were attacked.

The whole thing is beyond fucked, man. Kudos to you for trying to break free for your business, but I feel like you’ll just be fucking yourself in the long run.

Edit in advance: I should clarify that there will of course be exceptions where a small business can be successful just fine without advertising, but for those that rely on being discovered on a larger scale versus purely local, it is essential.

Trump hasn’t studied shit. His enablers and handlers have, though.

The judicial can only do so much. Congress being readily complicit makes this all much more difficult to combat.

Pretty much, haha. The amount of elitism among some Linux users is quite potent.

You’re being downvoted, but it’s true. Will it further enable lazy/dumb people to continue being lazy/dumb? Absolutely. But summarizing notes, generating boilerplate emails or script blocks, etc. was never deep, rigorous thinking to begin with. People literally said the same thing about handheld calculators, word processors, etc. Will some methods/techniques become esoteric as more and more mundane tasks are automated away? Almost certainly. Is that inherently a bad thing? Not in the majority of cases, in my opinion.

And before anyone chimes in with students abusing this tech and thus not becoming properly educated: All this means, is that various methods for gauging whether a student has achieved the baseline in any given subject will need to be implemented, e.g. proctored hand-written exams, homework structured in such a way that AI cannot easily do it, etc.

We have to do this ourselves in the government for every decommissioned server/appliance/end user device. We have to fill out paperwork for every single storage drive we destroy, and we can only destroy them using approved destruction tools (e.g. specific degaussers, drive shredders/crushers, etc). Appliances can be kind of a pain, though. It can be tricky sometimes finding all the writable memory in things like switches and routers. But, nothing is worse than storage arrays… destroying hundreds of drives is incredibly tedious.