Chetzemoka

Are you suggesting a privatized National Weather Service and toll bridges would be better? If so, I have a nice bear-ridden town in New Hampshire you might like to move to.

Regulations are exactly how you deal with negative externalities.The EPA makes corporations pay for reducing pollution and cleanup. Why do you think corporations target EPA so much? Because EPA costs them money. Never hear any corporations whining about that free taxpayer-funded geological data coming out of USGS

I like clean water, good weather forecasts, and I want to fix the bridges.

Deep cut Expanse reference. Specifically to an episode that had a lot of personal meaning for me.

GOP death cult be like, “Hear me out, do you really NEED to live though?”

To me, it’s all about rational return on investment providing economic incentives to achieve what we want to achieve.

My favorite example to explain what I mean is my own personal health insurance. I have a chronic medical condition that requires constant medication, frequent visits to specialists, and expensive medical tests and procedures. There is simply zero chance that I will ever pay enough in a monthly premium to cover what I cost. Meaning I am always a net financial loss for a private, for-profit insurance company.

This gives a private company every incentive in the world to obstruct and deny my care in hopes that I’ll get frustrated and give up, or maybe even die and get off their books forever.

The government, on the other hand, has a positive financial incentive to keep me healthy. If I am healthy, I am working, paying taxes, buying goods and services that contribute to the economy, and hopefully contributing something beneficial to my community. Only the government (acting as a proxy for “society”) naturally profits from insuring my healthcare.

This is why I believe we should have fully socialized medical care. Because there are some specific things that only the government has natural positive economic incentives that align with what is beneficial for the general public.

Whatever those things are, they should be socialized. And generally those things are basic life sustaining things like food, housing, medicine, education, utilities.

I’m fine with privatized capitalism in a very restricted, heavily regulated niche form. But all the basic necessities should be socialized.

“We”

I think YOU need to go meet some conservatives, because I have absolutely heard that exact terminology from some of my conservative relatives.

Injecting medications into necks.

Medical things are rarely accurate, but Jesus this one is absolutely infuriating. There’s no anatomy in a neck that you could even inject anything INTO. You’re not aiming for a jugular vein on the fly and there’s not enough tissue in a neck to receive an intramuscular or subcutaneous injection. If your needle is too long, you’re definitely hitting something critical. It’s feasible that you could squirt medication into someone’s trachea or esophagus or - god forbid - spine if you actually tried this nonsense.

Arms, people, ARMS. This is where we inject things into people who are not interested in receiving an injection. Arms or butts, right through the clothes. You’re aiming for the deltoid muscle or the glutes. I’m even willing to concede the inaccuracy of a medication affecting someone instantly (they don’t), if Hollywood would just stop having characters inject things into people’s necks.

On our next episode of medical things that make me crazy: People getting shot through the shoulder with zero consequences.

Tl;dw - European empires fucked everything up and we’re still living with the aftermath. Plus oil.

https://youtu.be/JN4mnVLP0rU?si=36-ZaPvu0vg4LN_m