friedmag

u/friedmag@lemmy.ml
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on Star Wars · c/microblogmemes · 11 pts · 155d

That's kind of his point. The original release didn't say that. The rerelease in 1978 did.

Public companies don't have to be evil, despite popular belief. It's a choice. Meanwhile, private equity is at least as consistently evil. Public/private is not in itself the problem. Greedy, sociopathic assholes are the problem.

I don't love Kaiser - the prices still suck. But they sometimes suck less, and their system is far more streamlined than I've had with other insurance providers. Still ridiculous to be trapped in a system with no control over or transparency into costs.

It would convert nicely enough to a single payer. Granted costs might suck but if they were just absorbed into the system, I wouldn't really care. I could at least believe they are trying to be efficient. As it is, I'm left believing I get charged as much as they think they can get away with. And wth else am I going to do? Kaiser is much cheaper than my employer's other option (there are literally 2), and I've had the other before. It just sucks (slightly) differently.

on Phew! Close one · c/politicalmemes · 8 pts · 306d

If it was a win, everyone would have voted for it. They would have declared victory. They would not have quietly done this on a Sunday with the minimum votes so most of them could have plausible deniability.

Is this really a cycle? The interesting thing to me is, as others have pointed out, it's mostly dropped right along with the stock market. Not looking so much like an uncorrelated asset.

That's a non argument. The VAST majority of wealth we are talking about is in equities which absolutely have a clear price. All that other stuff is noise to confuse the point. You really think the wealthy will put all their money in art that has no intrinsic value? And wait a sec, even if they did, what did they just pay for it? That seems like a perfectly valid basis for tax.

None of these values are ever perfect. The point is, we pay a small percentage of our assets every year, but the wealthy have convinced us they couldn't possibly. Most don't even "own" anything, it's all under tax and liability protected companies.

on Healthcare rule · c/196 · 3 pts · 1y

This is true for any real insurance, but not health insurance. Health Insurance premiums are decided by your employer, someone who has no reason to even be involved. It's entirely based on how much "benefit" they think they need to give you compared to their peers.