I don’t mean to argue but… where does that link show that 50% of spending is government spending?

What I see there is: Medicare 21% and Medicaid 18%, which sum to 39%.

If we apply that 39% to this country comparison chart, the US goes to the bottom of the list.

The real point here is that the US spends more for less. I just wouldn’t phrase it as “the US government” next time because, even if what you just said were correct, you’d be undercutting your point by half if you focused on the government.

That was genuinely pulled out of my ass. Not a benchmark comparison. It’s just my perception that cards only get incrementally better each year, but “this year’s card” is always proportionally much more expensive for what you get. Few games actually demand the very latest and greatest, so I don’t know why people would ever pay the premium for the latest and greatest.

You’re saying that all backlit LCDs are projectors?

Sometimes a product winds up in late-stage enshittification before its sector is fully developed. Just as the thing it does is beginning to fully explode, it begins to aggressively harvest its brand value. They miss the big wave, and everyone asks what happened. That’s one disadvantage in moving early. You also hit enshittification early.

Yeah I tried a lot of different clients and landed on this one for the long haul. It has held up well in the months since then.

Fuck him for taking anything from Tolkien’s legacy for his evil fucking purposes.

For years now the prices on this year’s latest cards are so high that I don’t know who buys them. I can afford to spend $1000 but I never would when I can probably get 85% of the performance for $250.

I’m wondering if he spent days unconscious after some cardiac event, before finally dying.

No. Just scroll up and down that page I linked and you’ll see some charts are labeled “national spending” and some are labeled “federal spending.” Federal is government. National is everything: government and private. The US government is not pouring 20% of GDP into healthcare, and then on top of that there’s all private spending.

Most of us have. There are just entrenched centers where the history goes very deep.

I see you’ve fallen into thinking that as long as we don’t talk about race, there’s no racism. And that actively trying to do something about racism draws attention to it, and is therefore racist.

The whole “I don’t see race” thing is empty. You can claim you don’t see race and so you don’t want to hear about it, while black people systematically get turned down for mortgages and have their houses appraised for less.

Maybe you don’t “see race” but society as a whole still does and you can see it in the numbers. Pointing that out and asking what we can do about it is not racism! That is not what racism ever was.

I would say that “not seeing race” is all well and good but you shouldn’t try to say that because you don’t think you see race, no one does, and therefore everyone should never mention it again. Do you see how that’s several leaps of logic thrown into one? And it makes you look like you’re desperate to bury any talk of the subject, which might be, you know… racist?

I agree the end state we would all like is one where no one sees race. But there’s no use pretending we are there when we aren’t.

I have only one correction and it’s a small one. The US spends more on healthcare but that spending isn’t all by the US government. Your main point still stands. The system sucks.

More on this:

In 2022, the United States spent an estimated $12,742 per person on healthcare — the highest healthcare costs per capita across similar countries.

Healthcare spending is driven by utilization (the number of services used) and price (the amount charged per service). An increase in either of those factors can result in higher healthcare costs. Despite spending nearly twice as much on healthcare per capita, utilization rates in the United States do not differ significantly from other wealthy OECD countries. Prices, therefore, appear to be the main driver of the cost difference between the United States and other wealthy countries.

There are many possible factors for why healthcare prices in the United States are higher than other countries, ranging from the consolidation of hospitals — leading to a lack of competition — to the inefficiencies and administrative waste that derive from the complexity of the U.S. healthcare system. In fact, the United States spends over $1,000 per person on administrative costs — almost five times more than the average of other wealthy countries and more than it spends on long-term healthcare.

Source

Yep. Interestingly, conservatives disagree on this. They’ll say that black people have absolutely nothing to complain about post Civil Rights Act of 1964. They think that once the law changed, everything else is just a matter of personal merit and fortune. They only recognize institutional racism. They seem to think either that personal and cultural racism doesn’t exist, or (more likely) that that is a personal choice which no one has any business complaining about.

It might occasionally be legit that an employer needs you to apply quickly.

But EVERY scam will say this.

You might just let this one go.

It’s a ritual sacrifice, so the important thing is that the person parted with the money. It’s not that important if the deity gets it, or who gets it.

At the public university I attended, there was a student health center where you could see a doctor for routine things. Not a complete hospital or anything but we weren’t totally on our own.

I was gonna say an all out thumb war between the peoples but I like your idea better.

Even though it was all dire news it was uplifting to just hear the actual truth and a clear moral direction articulated. I found it very refreshing. The bullshit is so THICK right now.

I hear that. I took those comments in a couple of ways:

1. he is at least to some degree describing real things that are happening
2. more so, I took it as an expression of faith that America has deep reserves of reason and dignity which are not exhausted yet
3. it was also a subtle cue to those of us who think we’re part of those reserves to get off our asses

Guy should really move on.