mpa92643

joined 2 years ago
[–] mpa92643@lemmy.world 49 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (5 children)

Any market where choosing not to participate is simply not a viable option should be prohibited from being for-profit.

If all smartphone makers start getting too greedy and charge too much, people will just not upgrade their phones and the smartphone makers will have to lower their prices or justify their higher prices with innovations. People can choose not to participate in the market and pressure the entire industry to lower their prices or create new features to encourage participation.

If insurance starts getting (read: gets even more) greedy, cancelling your insurance isn't an option, especially if you're sick. Foregoing insurance means either dying or accumulating extraordinary medical debt you can never repay. There is no pressure on insurance companies to lower their prices because you will always have to pick one of them. As long as they all increase their prices together, they all benefit and their profit keeps going up. Their only "innovations" in the industry are to minimize payments for medical services and maximize how much they shove in their pockets.

For-profit health insurance should be illegal.

[–] mpa92643@lemmy.world 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

We don't have a parliamentary system where a party can kick out an elected member for not supporting the party's agenda and replace them with someone else. Each member is individually elected to represent their state or district. For better or for worse, they get to decide what is best for their constituents and their constituents get to respond in the next election.

Joe Manchin was the major impediment in 2021-2023. He mostly supported the party's agenda but had some sticking points. He had to be onboard with whatever passed given the razor thin majority.

I saw all these screeds about how he should be kicked out of the party, but the objective reality is there is very little you can do to pressure a centrist Democrat from a state that voted for Trump by 50 points. The only option available was to placate him and come to a compromise (which he ultimately agreed to for major climate change reduction investment).

The reality is that the Democratic Party is not monolithic, it has some centrists who don't support some of the more ambitious goals of the party. If you want bigger action, you have to have a bigger majority. Slim majorities give small wings of the party outsized influence on policy.

[–] mpa92643@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

It definitely is.

If a recipe calls for 3 and 3/4 cups flour, I know right away I need three 1 cup scoops of flour and one 3/4 cup scoop.

If it calls for 15/4 cups, now I need to calculate how many one cup scoops it is and also what the additional remaining fraction is in addition to how much I've actually measured out so far.

The more numbers you need to keep in your head when following a recipe, the more likely you are to make a mistake.

 

This is literally just the r/nyt subreddit about The New York Times.

Given he apparently takes inspiration from Elon Musk, it's only a matter of time until u/spez starts adding post view limits unless you pay extra.