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Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: January 24th, 2025

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  • This is why I’m always a bit askance when presented with Atheism as some kind of enlightened philosophy.

    Its not a philosophy, its a position on the existence of god.

    is kinda simple-minded and divorced from any historical perspective on its face.

    Its simple because its only a statement of belief in no god in the form of identification. A historical perspective is not needed to come to a conclusion as to whether people who believe in god are stupid or smart. You can also do that through thinking about their rationality or logical process for coming to those conclusions.

    You’re casually dismissing whole intermediate strains of philosophical and literary development

    If I wrote a philosophy or theology about how everything is made of bananas, and then for hundreds/thousands of years people argued about the nuances of my absurd and baseless belief system I think it’d be fair to dismiss it anyway. It doesn’t matter how much fan fiction is written about Musaceae-ology. You don’t have to read it, you can safely ignore it.


  • I’m bi (specifically polysexual, but that gets confusing because its less well known and I’m also polyamorous) and my attraction to specific genitals is roughly equal to body morphology and a cute face’s importance, but I’m simply way less less picky about them.

    I wish I was just as non-picky about the body morphology and cute faces. My romantic life would probably have been way more fulfilling at this point if that had been the case.






  • HalfSalesman@lemm.eetoMemes@lemmy.mlHave some civility.
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    2 months ago

    That’s not what the people who are gleeful about his impending death are downright cheering about. They’re gleeful because of their parasocial hatred of the man.

    What you are talking about is an entirely different discussion. You are just shifting the goalposts.

    I hate Biden because he had a major hand in letting Trump win, but I legitimately do not give a fuck that hes dying of cancer, pro or con. He is irrelevant now. And the people invested in this are experiencing their own derangement syndrome, only worse than most cases because Biden is no longer even president.



  • HalfSalesman@lemm.eetoMemes@lemmy.mlHave some civility.
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    2 months ago

    What if I don’t give a flying fuck about Biden? And I find both the people dancing about his nearing demise and the people clutching their pearls about that fucking stupid? There are almost certainly more important things of substance to place your energy into.

    I’m so fucking tired.




  • To top it off, if the US was pressured to reduce its CO2 as harshly as possible, you’d probably force the US to improve its walking and bicycle infrastructure in cities and add additional pressure to incentivize people to move closer to work, likely drastically improving the average American’s quality of life through shorter commutes, less dangerous driving related deaths, less pollution, and less social atomization.

    The only people external pressure to reduce CO2 would really hurt are like the richest 10-5% of people here anyway. So I’m all for it even beyond the environmental benefits.





  • If the market is sufficiently competitive, yes, I trust corporations more than governments.

    Competition naturally degrades over time as companies go out of business and consolidate. And capital interests fight tooth and nail against large monopolies being split back up. Its more or less a miracle that it’s ever happened at all and it would be naive to think it’ll ever happen again.

    If the market is sufficiently competitive, yes, I trust corporations more than governments.

    I don’t think that’s true. I think you’re making an assumption that the payer has an incentive to reduce costs, but I really don’t think that’s the case. What they do have is a lot of power over pricing, and while that could be used to force producers to reduce costs, it can also be used to shift costs onto taxpayers in exchange for favors from the companies providing the services.

    Do you think a more direct “medical patient union” would work? Skipping a government intermediary?

    socialized healthcare

    I mean, I’d prefer socialized healthcare over single payer. Single payer for me is merely an acceptable middle ground. As would having a proper public option next to private care (though admittedly that would slowly erode from lobbying).




  • Not a word I like to hear when it comes to government. The more power you give it, the more likely some idiot will come along and abuse it. Look at Trump, the only reason he can absolutely wreck the economy w/ tariffs is because Congress gave him that power and refuses to curtail it.

    So you’d rather give power to corporations. Who definitely abuse their power. Rather than a government, which at least is potentially elected.

    I think governmental structures are probably outside the scope of this conversation, but I’ll at least state that the reason Trump is bad is not only that he has power. Its the lack of power that his opposition has because they utterly fail to seize it when opportunity presents itself. Again, it is all about leverage.

    Sure, but they’re getting a lot less of it than they could if it was a more competitive market.

    They pay obscene amounts to get decent results. I think they could get the same (or better!) results with a lot less spending if the system wasn’t rigged to be anti-competitive.

    I think that this is pure conjecture. Going “full competitive” would be at best a double edged sword. A lot of money and risk is involved in highly advanced military tech. Realistically you’d see businesses crumble and merge. Naturally converging into a monopoly.

    I think that only works in countries w/o a large medical devices/pharmaceutical industry, otherwise you end up with ton of lobbying and whatnot. I don’t think the total cost of healthcare would go down, it would just shift to net tax payers and healthy people. Look at the ACA, it didn’t reduce healthcare spending at all, it just shifted who pays for it, and it seems healthy people ended up spending more (to subsidize less healthy people).

    To actually reduce costs, you need to make pricing as transparent as possible, and I don’t think single payer achieves that. It can be a good option in certain countries, but I don’t think it’s universally a good option.

    To actually reduce costs, you increase the leverage the buyer has. Transparency in pricing would do that to a tiny degree, what would do so far better is a monopsony/single-payer system where all the buyers effectively are unionized.

    Again, it always boils down to leverage.


  • Only have access to this account during work, so late reply.

    We’re talking about IP protections, not general monopolies

    It doesn’t matter, monopolization at any level has the effect I described.

    Yeah, that’s not going to be abused

    You’d need to elaborate I’m not clear what you mean by this.

    scare away companies

    There are ways to force this into not being an issue. We don’t have to suck a corporation’s dick to keep their productivity.

    It’s also why the US pays an obscene amount for its military. Defense contractors absolutely fleece the government because they are generally not allowed to contract with other governments, so they expect a higher profit from their one contracted buyer.

    It sounds like the military is still getting what they paid for and its worked out for them. They pay obscene amounts to get obscene results.

    Single payer also applies to healthcare proposals and is generally seen as a fantastic solution to keeping healthcare prices down.