volkris @volkris@qoto.org

@sc_griffith whoever said you should be grateful?

React however you want. I really don't care how you feel about insurance.

But when you form that opinion, it seems to me you should at least be factually informed about the situation, and consider that you'll be paying either way.

The only difference is whether you involve the insurance company as a middleman or not, involving them in your business and having them tack a charge on top as a processing fee.

@swamphox you realize there is viral load in that dampness in your mask?

That's a mask working, that you can see for yourself.

The dampness of a mask after you've worn it is viral material that the mask has trapped.

@maniajack the US system doesn't leave any such choice up to any single individual, though. There are checks and balances.

Thomas didn't act unilaterally.

Rather, Thomas's opinion was joined by most of the members of the Supreme Court and was itself built on rulings going back into the history of the SCOTUS and deep into the history of courts below.

Stories focusing on personalities instead of processes or arguments make for good drama and clickbait, but they don't really inform the public as to what's going on with their governments.

Regardless, I suppose I'm talking about checks and balances in general. The Court refused to grant executive branches powers that they legally don't have, even if the restraints involved a reference to history.

@resuna you said, "something like the Westminster Parliamentary System and transferable votes"

The "and" there meant you weren't suggesting it as good in and of itself. If you didn't mean "and" that's fine, but the "and" did lump the two together.

You really seem to be putting parties ahead of other legislative functions in your comments. You focused on having third parties, and now you're bringing up multi-party environments.

But I'd say that focus on party overlooks the more important role of representing people, ahead of party, that we tend to want in our democratic processes.

@cinnarose @1dalm @brianklaas

@sc_griffith I think it's telling that you're willing to declare something as naive when you don't even care what you're talking about.

Now THAT'S naive.

But no, this just an expression of mathematical reality. A business cannot spend money it doesn't have. Therefore it has to raise revenues to cover higher costs.

Yeah things would be more complicated if insurance companies could print their own money, but they can't, and that really simplifies the reality before us.

@AnthonyFStevens and what if it's really not possible?

What if it really is like trying to grow wings, seriously just not an option on the table?

We can work with such a reality and try to get through it as well as possible, but we can't so long as we're denying that unfortunate reality.

I still don't hear a workable plan here, just vague ideas. I don't know how to get from here to there, and I think it's not possible, but these vague ideas don't bridge the gap.

@Vincarsi where is that wealth?

Again, it's Scrooge McDuck. Do you think they have moneyvaults that they go swimming in? Giant piles of coins? Maybe their driveways are paved with currency?

No, of course not. In a modern society people invest their wealth, making it available for use by others.

Because modern cultures push those with money to share their money with others, and not to hoard it.

There's a good chance your paycheck is in part made possible by some rich guy sharing his wealth with your employer, even if indirectly.

Now I'm not saying anything about whether this is good or bad or whether rich people are good people. I figure most of them aren't. BUT the reality is that wealthy people don't tend to hoard their wealth.

Even if such stories make for compelling clickbait and political messaging.

@swamphox have you ever worn a mask and noticed that it gets a little damp?

Guess, what, that's it doing shit.

If you've ever worn a mask you've been able to see for yourself that masks do shit, and if not, well most of the rest of us have.

The claim that masks don't do shit is just as obviously wrong as a claim that masks provide 100% protection. Both extremes are clearly wrong.

@AnthonyFStevens

But that's circling back to, what's the plan? :)

Or what's the plan to get agreement on a plan, I suppose.

This is the problem. I don't think it's possible to have a workable plan, just as I don't think it's possible to grow wings.

I don't think there is a whole united nation that just wants peace and an end to war, and I see no plan to get there.

@Vincarsi I'm not talking about altruism, though. You brought that up, but it's not necessary to highlight that our culture doesn't value hoarding wealth.

Wealth hoarding is already not considered a virtue. It has nothing to do with altruism but rather alignment of interests, people being rewarded for working in common interests.

It's fine to prefer altruism and think that's panacea to all of society's ills, but in the mean time we can recognize the way the institutions we have now work for the common good.

And in particular, the way the institutions we have now punish the hoarding of wealth, if that's something you care about.

@AnthonyFStevens

How do you plan to cut extremists off from their support base and isolate them?

@AnthonyFStevens

Ok, so what's your plan?

Because people have executed plans time and time again that haven't lead to peace. It sounds like you'd be saying, "But this time is different," which is what was always said before.

So what's your plan that really will make this time different?

I'm especially interested in what your plan is for removing Hamas since that strikes me as particularly thorny.

@Vincarsi

But we're already there.

People working in the context of modern financial systems are discouraged from hoarding wealth and rewarded for spreading it around as society pays them returns on their investments.

There are no Scrooge McDucks with money pools in places with modern banking.

Such hoarding represents a tremendous opportunity cost, so people don't.

@forteller

When it comes to Fediverse, the answer to such questions is generally no.

That's just how federation works.

Without a central system there's no single point that knows everything, so nobody knows what everyone else is posting.

@mobilizon

@rberger

Too few people consider that when a person is surprised by the course of events, it means that person either didn't know what they were talking about or had really poor judgment.

Either way, that the person was surprised is not in itself news. It's only an indicator that the person is unreliable.

We really need to do a better job of calling out surprise and then discounting the future statements of the people who, it turned out, didn't know what was going on.

@JFallows

@AnthonyFStevens but an awful lot of people who talk actually can't!

Again, this is the example of growing wings when jumping out of the airplane. Some things are flat out impossible, and it's important not miss those.

But again, I think you're wrong, but even IF you're right, the Zionists you refer to won't be removed. I'm personally pretty skeptical that Hamas will be removed either, no matter how much blood is shed in the attempt to get there.

So with those two in doubt, we're 80% farther from peace than you're imagining.

We need to respond to that reality and figure out what the best way forward is, given that.

Otherwise we're talking about solutions that only apply to a fantasy world that doesn't actually exist.

Where would we like to fly once we grow wings? Well, since we're not going to grow wings it's not a very useful question.

@magitweeter how do you figure?

Fossil fuels will be obsolete when a better option out competes them.

I don't know how you make a, what, a person that's better than rich? How do you outcompete a rich person?

A fundamental quirk there is that the rich status is itself indicator of relative competition.

@Vincarsi

@Vincarsi I'd first stop and realize that making rich people obsolete is a tearing down when it's healthier to focus on building up.

But that dovetails with what you're saying, as stopping to enjoy MrBeast is building up.

We should focus on the positive and not the negative.

@swamphox masks are about mitigating risk, not eliminating it.

That she tested positive doesn't really say anything about any reasonable claim on this topic.

@taylorlorenz just responding to the headline, which not both?

An awful lot of narcissists manage to monetize their dysfunction, even in traditional media and politics.