Anonymous asked: Why is healthcare harmful? Do you mean actually treating diseases/injuries is harmful on average (or not worth it), or just the entire system around that?
Healthcare in the US is a massive waste of resources and spending tax money on it is thus harmful. Singapore is able to get better results for poor people and cover all of its population at a fraction of what the US spends on a fraction of its population (per capita, obviously; Singapore spends approximately 1/3 of US public healthcare spending on all healthcare, of which around half is tax money).
In fact, the situation is so bad that even western european countries that provide public healthcare for all their citizens a lot less efficiently than Singapore nonetheless end up paying less per capita than the US spends tax money on Medicare+Medicaid alone.
Thus, it’s totally possible to deliver far better outcomes while cutting the public healthcare spending to 200B a year, all it takes is the will to do it.
Unfortunately democracies tend to be really bad in the “will” department and thus I don’t really see a way to reform the current system. The only real way forward I could imagine is radical and sweeping cuts and privatizing the system into “private as in privacy”, extreme deregulation of healthcare (enough to make sure deregulatory capture doesn’t end up being a problem, and by that I mean “enough to make 90% of the population scared shitless”, because lesser deregulation is just immensely ripe for capture by politically favored special interests, as has been seen in many countries), and providing people enough free money so they can afford to buy their healthcare on the newly-freed markets. It would be painful, it would look terrible as many people would suffer through no fault of their own, but in the end it would render healthcare actually affordable even to poor people.
2 weeks ago · 2 notes · .permalink
shieldfoss:
shkreli-for-president:
razors-on-her-tongue:
h3lldalg0:
razors-on-her-tongue:
h3lldalg0:
razors-on-her-tongue:
der-kleine-vampir:
h3lldalg0:
razors-on-her-tongue:
abolish ¾ length sleeves and capri pants imo, that is such a bad length for clothing to be
Stay away from my perfect sleeves.
¾ sleeves are best sleeves
¾ sleeves are worst sleeves. ¾ are a nightmare made flesh. ¾ sleeves are a curse upon the world, a darkness that will not subside, an abomination unto fashion. ¾ sleeves must be destroyed
We will fight at dawn.
no. dawn is a terrible time. dawn is desolate and freezing, no warmth nor sun to light the way. dawn is early, before the night has truly ended, before right-thinking people have arisen. dawn is suffering. one should not be awake at dawn. we will fight at high noon, when the sun is at its apex and its light has filled the sky. come alone, and bring no weapons. we shall settle this with our bare hands, and when i have won and you have been thoroughly defeated, you shall acknowledge the truth of what i say: ¾ sleeves are awful, and ought not to exist. so it has always been and so it shall always be. this is the truth of the world, this is the light and the way.
Dawn is when the dust clears and the air is clean. Dawn brings clarity and sharp edges, and purifies the few who stand beneath it. Dawn is its own weapon, its own defense, a barrier to weakness and fortification for the strong.
I will come at noon, but I will bring the razor’s edge of dawn.
dawn is hell, if hell were cold. dawn is the bleak darkness of the void, the despair that consumes. dawn is the temporal equivalent of ¾ sleeves–and is therefore entirely appropriate for you, you heathen, you philistine, you lover of the worst that fashion has to offer.
we are agreed then; noon it is. i anticipate our meeting with great glee.
you hate the sunrise. how could you. sunrises are important. when else would we carry out our tr00 kvlt rites, if not at sunrise, the most tr00 und kvlt time of the day
A thing I have done:
Woken up at 3 in the night because then I’d have enough time to walk all the way to the coast and see the sun rise above the ocean.
I had blisters and my legs were fucking killing me.
Worth it.
Hello fellow sunrise aficionado. I tend to use my bike, and instead of blisters I once got a temporary phobia of deer, but otherwise that sounds precisely like something I’ve done.
(via shieldfoss)
2 weeks ago · 39 notes · source: razors-on-her-tongue · .permalink
Anonymous asked: If UBI was implemented now, before the robot utopia, who would do the lousy jobs that need to be done? I mean, who's going to be a janitor or a plumber when they can get UBI for doing nothing?
mugasofer:
socialjusticemunchkin:
ozymandias271:
pervocracy:
dendritic-trees:
pervocracy:
Being a janitor or a plumber will have to pay more than the Universal Basic Income and offer some sweet perks. The job market can still exist without the “work or die” threat, it’ll just look very different.
Of course this means that hiring a janitor or plumber will be very expensive, but that’ll be all the more motivation for people to invent robo-janitors.
(Which means that former janitors will take a pay cut when they go from janitor pay to UBI, but the whole point of UBI is that it’s not poverty level and living on it is not a disaster.)
…Yeah, as before, I’m not 100% sure the math works out here, but I like to think there’s some way of transcending “we have clean toilets because we threaten people with starvation!”
I’ve also seen explanations of UBI which I think have some merit, which is just that a janitors salary + UBI is more than UBI which is usually supposed to keep you just above the poverty line, and not much else. So your janitor in a lot of cases would look at the situation and go well, I can quit my job and live just above the poverty line and be okay, but I could also keep working as a janitor and make twice that!
So the really big impact that UBI would make is that people would be more willing to leave jobs where they were being mistreated, or wouldn’t be put in the position of needing multiple jobs to survive.
Okay, this is a slightly different meaning than I thought. My understanding of UBI is “if you make less than $x, UBI will make up the difference,” not “everyone gets UBI in addition to whatever else they make.”
The second interpretation solves some problems, but makes the “where the hell is this money actually coming from” question even harder.
The average person gets a $10,000 UBI and a $10,000 increase in taxes, for a net gain of $0.
The UBI (or a negative income tax, which is a slightly different implementation of the same idea) is phased out gradually, so that you don’t get cliffs with an effective marginal tax rate of 70% or 80%, and so you always earn more money by doing more work. This is hard as hell to do with multiple welfare programs, because you have to coordinate sixty different programs, some of which only apply in some states, and it’s a huge hassle. The simplicity of only having one welfare program to do that with is one of the advantages of UBI.
Or or or or or we could just abolish all the useless and/or outright harmful programs! That way we wouldn’t need to raise taxes that much, if at all, while still being able to give people $10,000. Of course, that’s politically impossible because a lot of those programs buy a massive amount of votes from asshole rentiers, but the US could totally afford to give everyone a “free” $10k a year (compared to the status quo) if it actually tried to solve the problem.
How much do we spend on useless and/or outright harmful programs?
To pay $10k to all residents would require approximately 3.2 trillion.
Department of Health and Human Services spends 1.1 trillion. Healthcare is harmful. The Singapore model could treat the entire population for around 400 billion, of which something like 200 billion would be government spending. This would free 900B.
990B goes to social security. There are 65M beneficiaries suggesting that if all social security payments were cut by $10k a year on average it would free 650B, for a total of 1.55T so far. This would redistribute from the high-receiving people to the low-receiving people but it’s tax money and a ponzi scheme so it’s totally fair.
Defense is 560B. It’s harmful, lots of pork and inefficiency and cronyism, and then there’s also the “going to other people’s countries and killing them for no good reason” thing. Cut by 300B and nothing of value will have been lost. 1.85T
Department of Agriculture is 150B. Most of it harmful. Cut 120B, especially from subsidies. Farms can live or die on the free market, and poor people deserve to get money instead of food stamps; 1.97T.
Department of Commerce is 10B. Let’s cut it by half. 1.975T
Education is 80B. When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging. Higher education won’t get cheaper by subsidizing it, and children’s education will be affordable with the basic income; remove 65B for 2.04T
Energy is 30B. Let’s say 10B of that is actually easy to cut. 2.05T
DHS is 50B. Kill the evil motherfucker. Cut it all. Reallocate 10B for the not-evil parts from somewhere else, but I just want to see DHS gone. 2.09T
Housing and Urban Development is 30B. Let’s leave them 5B just in case they might have a reason to exist. 2.115T
Department of Interior is small in comparison, at 15B. Cut 5B just because. 2.120T
Department of Labor is 40B. We’re going to drop 35B and downsize it to OSHA, and OSHA alone. OSHA will have its budget multiplied almost 10-fold. 2.155T
Transportation is 80B and produces an oversupply of roads. Roads are harmful. I’m an anarchist, I hate roads. Remove the road moneys of 40B and then there will be no reason for the government to exist. (disclaimer: I’m most likely not serious about that one, only about the number; toll roads paid for by their users are nice) 2.195T
EITC is 70B and its entire point is to be replaced. 2.265T
DOJ needs to end the war on drugs and adopt nordic policies towards prison terms (minimize them), and just cut the fuck out, thus saving 10B for 2.275T
Cut wages of federal employees by 25B to compensate for the free $10k they would be getting; focus especially on the most lucrative (=overpaid) jobs. 2.3T
All in all, we’re only missing 900B from being able to give everyone $10k, and we haven’t even touched state budgets. Since we’re neck-deep in fantasyland already we might as well sail the cutters to the states as well. 20B goes from replacing cash assistance. 150B from removing Medicaid as Harmful. 10B from other forms of social spending. We’re now at 720B. California spends 50B a year on education, which can be cut back somewhat as the basic income extends to children as well (or provides vouchers) and I’ll just assume the other states have enough slack in their budgets to cut a total of 220B from so now we’re at 500B. That’s the equivalent of taking the UBI away from the richest 15% of the country.
If we introduce a gradual phaseout to deal with that part, the average american will lose about $1500 of their $10k. Done. That’s it. No new taxes, other than the phaseout and some shifting from state taxes to federal taxes. A lot of utterly impossible fiscal magic, but it’s ~*~theoretically doable~*~.
2 weeks ago · 180 notes · source: pervocracy · .permalink
socialjusticemunchkin:
sdhs-rationalist:
socialjusticemunchkin:
ozymandias271:
a surprising number of Democrats seem to be getting the wrong answer to the question “should Martin Luther King Jr. have been allowed to buy a gun?”
I love this heuristic. If your gun control scheme would render MLK unable to get a gun, what it is is a shitty gun control scheme. Now we just need to find a way to coordinate the mass scorning of every democrat who ever suggests a gun control scheme that fails the MLK test.
(And non-democrats too, let’s not discriminate unwarrantedly, but instead let reality do the discrimination for us at least until republicans start being less about the Second Amendment and more about the “Let’s bully black people some more” thing.)
wait wait wait wait wait wait
any gun control scheme that fails this specific edge case regardless of the reason deserves “mass scorning”
is that what you are saying?
I want to make sure I am not misunderstanding this suggestion.
Are you, @socialjusticemunchkin and by proxy @ozymandias271 (Though ozy has not stated the necessity for scorn and the degree of wrongness of the answer), by the above statement, in fact intending to say that any gun control scheme that fails to give MLK (understood to mean MLK in his current state, if you want to retcon MLK to have firearms training then do so explicitly, if he did already then source your evidence) the ability to purchase a firearm is A) shitty and B) deserving of mass scorn?
Any scheme that would render MLK specifically unable to get firearms, due to reasons that are political instead of competency-related, is what I’m saying. If he had eg. some health issue that would’ve made him unable to shoot straight it is one thing, but stuff that relies on “the government has decided this person is a bad person” is another. And a reasonable degree of training in safe handling etc. would obviously be retconned into the question, as it’s intended to be about the difference between MLK and some random guy somewhere.
Some further clarification: because the government is evil, it could still possibly find a way to prevent MLK from getting guns even with a reasonable system.
But the point of the test is to determine whether it’s obvious that MLK would’ve been totally barred from having guns; if it requires a significantly non-trivial degree of creativity from the State to find out a way to bully people it doesn’t like one can consider the test passed at least in the “not needing to mass scorn people” sense, but simple and naive things like “no guns for people on the no-fly list” need to be discredited from the popular discourse.
(via socialjusticemunchkin)
2 weeks ago · tagged #guns cw #the best heuristic for oppressed people since sharp stick time · 65 notes · source: ozymandias271 · .permalink
sdhs-rationalist:
socialjusticemunchkin:
ozymandias271:
a surprising number of Democrats seem to be getting the wrong answer to the question “should Martin Luther King Jr. have been allowed to buy a gun?”
I love this heuristic. If your gun control scheme would render MLK unable to get a gun, what it is is a shitty gun control scheme. Now we just need to find a way to coordinate the mass scorning of every democrat who ever suggests a gun control scheme that fails the MLK test.
(And non-democrats too, let’s not discriminate unwarrantedly, but instead let reality do the discrimination for us at least until republicans start being less about the Second Amendment and more about the “Let’s bully black people some more” thing.)
wait wait wait wait wait wait
any gun control scheme that fails this specific edge case regardless of the reason deserves “mass scorning”
is that what you are saying?
I want to make sure I am not misunderstanding this suggestion.
Are you, @socialjusticemunchkin and by proxy @ozymandias271 (Though ozy has not stated the necessity for scorn and the degree of wrongness of the answer), by the above statement, in fact intending to say that any gun control scheme that fails to give MLK (understood to mean MLK in his current state, if you want to retcon MLK to have firearms training then do so explicitly, if he did already then source your evidence) the ability to purchase a firearm is A) shitty and B) deserving of mass scorn?
Any scheme that would render MLK specifically unable to get firearms, due to reasons that are political instead of competency-related, is what I’m saying. If he had eg. some health issue that would’ve made him unable to shoot straight it is one thing, but stuff that relies on “the government has decided this person is a bad person” is another. And a reasonable degree of training in safe handling etc. would obviously be retconned into the question, as it’s intended to be about the difference between MLK and some random guy somewhere.
2 weeks ago · tagged #guns cw · 65 notes · source: ozymandias271 · .permalink
metagorgon asked: isn't that exactly what ozy said?
Yes, I’m just making the implicit explicit so we can coordinate the mass scorning better when people are aware that it’s a thing we could and should do. I’m trying to make it actually catch on, and considering how many people in the audience are autistic or otherwise bad with implied messages, I don’t think making it clear would be harmful. At least as long as people don’t do like they did with the ‘Bechdel test’ and start crediting the idea to me instead of Ozy, as that would be terrible. I’m a pirate who’s all for expropriating information, but giving credit is sacrosanct (mostly because my brain expropriates ideas so constantly that I very seldom remember where I stole which piece from; nowadays I’m basically assuming that everything I say is derivative from something somewhere).
Now everyone please contact your local representative and tell them that surely they don’t wish to be the kind of people who would deny MLK his constitutional rights.
2 weeks ago · 4 notes · .permalink
ozymandias271:
a surprising number of Democrats seem to be getting the wrong answer to the question “should Martin Luther King Jr. have been allowed to buy a gun?”
I love this heuristic. If your gun control scheme would render MLK unable to get a gun, what it is is a shitty gun control scheme. Now we just need to find a way to coordinate the mass scorning of every democrat who ever suggests a gun control scheme that fails the MLK test.
(And non-democrats too, let’s not discriminate unwarrantedly, but instead let reality do the discrimination for us at least until republicans start being less about the Second Amendment and more about the “Let’s bully black people some more” thing.)
2 weeks ago · tagged #guns cw #the best heuristic for oppressed people since sharp stick time · 65 notes · source: ozymandias271 · .permalink
Anonymous asked: If UBI was implemented now, before the robot utopia, who would do the lousy jobs that need to be done? I mean, who's going to be a janitor or a plumber when they can get UBI for doing nothing?
ozymandias271:
pervocracy:
dendritic-trees:
pervocracy:
Being a janitor or a plumber will have to pay more than the Universal Basic Income and offer some sweet perks. The job market can still exist without the “work or die” threat, it’ll just look very different.
Of course this means that hiring a janitor or plumber will be very expensive, but that’ll be all the more motivation for people to invent robo-janitors.
(Which means that former janitors will take a pay cut when they go from janitor pay to UBI, but the whole point of UBI is that it’s not poverty level and living on it is not a disaster.)
…Yeah, as before, I’m not 100% sure the math works out here, but I like to think there’s some way of transcending “we have clean toilets because we threaten people with starvation!”
I’ve also seen explanations of UBI which I think have some merit, which is just that a janitors salary + UBI is more than UBI which is usually supposed to keep you just above the poverty line, and not much else. So your janitor in a lot of cases would look at the situation and go well, I can quit my job and live just above the poverty line and be okay, but I could also keep working as a janitor and make twice that!
So the really big impact that UBI would make is that people would be more willing to leave jobs where they were being mistreated, or wouldn’t be put in the position of needing multiple jobs to survive.
Okay, this is a slightly different meaning than I thought. My understanding of UBI is “if you make less than $x, UBI will make up the difference,” not “everyone gets UBI in addition to whatever else they make.”
The second interpretation solves some problems, but makes the “where the hell is this money actually coming from” question even harder.
The average person gets a $10,000 UBI and a $10,000 increase in taxes, for a net gain of $0.
The UBI (or a negative income tax, which is a slightly different implementation of the same idea) is phased out gradually, so that you don’t get cliffs with an effective marginal tax rate of 70% or 80%, and so you always earn more money by doing more work. This is hard as hell to do with multiple welfare programs, because you have to coordinate sixty different programs, some of which only apply in some states, and it’s a huge hassle. The simplicity of only having one welfare program to do that with is one of the advantages of UBI.
Or or or or or we could just abolish all the useless and/or outright harmful programs! That way we wouldn’t need to raise taxes that much, if at all, while still being able to give people $10,000. Of course, that’s politically impossible because a lot of those programs buy a massive amount of votes from asshole rentiers, but the US could totally afford to give everyone a “free” $10k a year (compared to the status quo) if it actually tried to solve the problem.
2 weeks ago · 180 notes · source: pervocracy · .permalink
bgaesop:
I see this all the time, people saying “transwomen are risking their lives just by existing!” and bemoaning the high murder rate of trans women, things like that.
But when I actually look at the data, it paints a very different story.
There were 22 trans women murdered in the USA in 2015. There aren’t quality numbers about how many trans women there are in the USA total, but estimates put the total at around 700,000. Assuming half of those are trans women, that’s 350,000 (it’s probably more, but that would help my case). That’s a murder rate of about 6.2 per 100,000 people.
Cis women are murdered at a rate of about 1.95 per 100,000 people. So it looks like trans women are in much more danger than their cis counterparts, right?
Well, yes, if all we’re going to compare them to is women. But if we look at male victims of violence (which folks so rarely do, for some reason), we see that men are murdered at a rate of 6.56 per 100,000 people [ibid].
Which is to say, slightly more often than trans women.
Transitioning from being a man to a woman makes you safer.
So where did this idea of trans women as constant victims of violence come from? Is there something I’m missing in the data? Is it just an issue of nobody caring about violence against men, so they only compare trans women to cis women? What’s going on?
All of those 22 seemed to be black or hispanic, a population making around 30% of the US and thus an estimated 100,000 trans women for convenience. This gives a murder rate of 22/100,000.
Furthermore, that article was in late October, suggesting that if murders happen at a steady pace, they were missing approximately 20% of the year’s murders that would put the total at 26/100,000 instead.
And considering that 19 of the murdered women were black, while those estimates give roughly 40,000 black trans women, the murder rate is something like 50/100,000 when accounting for the couple of expected missing murders.
Then there’s the way male victims of homicide tend to be substantially more likely to…have engaged in activities universally agreed to constitute a lifestyle in which getting murdered is not such an unexpected thing. What I’m saying is that, just like we track combatant deaths and civilian deaths in wars separately, trans women are probably more likely to fall in the category which is the murder equivalent of “noncombatant”. When black men are killed, they relatively often are the same kind of people as the killers while trans women are not. (I won’t try to put numbers on it, but I’m pretty sure everyone knows that eg. gangs tend to shoot members of rival gangs more (per capita) than they shoot random outsiders; not saying it isn’t a tragedy, but it’s a different kind of tragedy and “violent men kill non-violent men and women” tickles people’s justice nerves more than “violent men kill other violent men”.) And when one counts that the homicide rate among black people is something like 17/100,000 and a rough estimate would imply a rate of ~25-30/100,000 for black men, black trans women are being killed at almost twice the rate of black men, and even more if one focuses on “non-combatant” murders of people who weren’t involved in doing violence to others (eg. assuming that 1 in 6 murdered black men were “combatants”, it gives trans women a ratio of approximately or over double that of “civilian” men).
Now, what possible factors could be causing one to overestimate the rate? That estimate on the number of trans women is on the low side and the real numbers are probably twice that. This would mean that black trans women would “only” be killed at the same rate as black men. On the other hand we don’t know how many trans women are murdered but labeled as men and not found out about. Thus the real numbers are probably somewhere vaguely between 25-50/100,000, and I’d guess probably a bit closer to the low side than the high.
In fact, this is something the non-shitty SJ people try to draw attention to: it’s not about white trans people; thus saying that “trans people” are having an extremely high risk of being murdered, when it’s specifically TWoC who actually get killed, is at best disingenuous and at worst completely detracting from the actual issues by glossing over that specificity. And this also suggests that black men are also suffering from massive amounts of violence that society should do something about (instead of doing something that lets it look like it’s doing something), as it’s almost as dangerous to be a black man as it is to be a black trans woman (and when we add class to this it gets even more extreme).
(via theungrumpablegrinch)
2 weeks ago · tagged #death cw #murder cw #transmisogyny cw · 128 notes · .permalink
sinesalvatorem:
My pet peeve: Neo-Nazis who try to use “goyim” as an adjective.
It’s “goyishe”! We’re using feminism and multiculturalism to destroy goyishe culture! Get it right, you shliemels.
TBH I don’t think a basic comprehension of Yiddish is very high on the priorities of neo-nazis.
I mean, considering the apparent extent of their capabilities for basic comprehension they would be very rational to ration their usage and spend the scarcity on more pressing concerns than Yiddish grammar.
(Bvt as a ridicvlovs evropean polyglot I am bothered by how they don’t even realize that it’s a germanic strvctvre present in basically all the langvages they consider to be spoken by the right sorts of people. I mean, they speak engl-ish yet don’t realize this? They are being shitty germanics, that’s what they are. I know my germanics way better than they do, and I’m not even germanic. I’m a total mongoloid vntermensch from behind-slavs-land who hasn’t even screwed a germanic ever (now that I think of it I totally need to cvck their race; if I apply racism to a map of variovs attractednesses it prodvces a nice graph of kind-of-everything-bvt-germanics and that’s fvnny). No wonder the germanic white race is dying ovt when its heroes are of svch great scholarship and mvch intellectval formidability!)
2 weeks ago · tagged #racism cw #nazis cw · 30 notes · source: sinesalvatorem · .permalink