Health Insurance that covers next to nothing but costs a fortune anyway.
☝️ recently got a covid test that based on all my research beforehand, it should have been covered except for $10 I would pay.
Jokes on me, it actually cost me $200 they charged to my credit card two weeks later. I didn't even get to know the price at the time I needed medical care.
Sometimes other countries make fun of America for things they don't understand. Not on this one, America deserves every bit of mocking it gets for it's medical coverage atrocity.
You can get free rapid covid test kits from the US government with a valid mailing address.
Recently?
How a lawyer in America got jailed for legally fighting against(and defeating) an American multi-national oil company that polluted the Amazon and more importantly harmed the lives and health of the locals with the pollution.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OtIAZMqrZE
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Donziger
Donziger’s story is heartbreaking and infuriating, and I’m continually disappointed that so few people are familiar with his story and what the courts did to him. It’s one of the clearest examples of judicial corruption and the power and benefits that are afforded to corporations and almost never extended to the people fighting for what’s right and just.
In June 2022, a federal appeals court affirmed Donziger's criminal contempt conviction. In March 2023, the Supreme Court declined to hear further appeals.
I'm shocked.
Here in Sweden we currently have the problem that hospitals are understaffed and keeping wages of nurses so low that a lot of nurses quit and leave the others with an even crazier workload so the hospitals buy nurses semi permanently from temp agencies that cost multiple times more and the rental nurses have better pay and agreements of overtime and such. We had a well functioning health care but then the privatisation of everything and selling out communally owned services to private profit making schemes since the 90s. Because our government has been dominated by right wing market liberals and "sossehöger" - social democrats that jump on right wing populism to stay in power when they can rather than being consistent in left wing ideals.
Fucking end the market liberal experiment already. "The market solves all problems" - yeah, of it's own interest which is how to squeeze out more profits regardless the how and how low it stoops.
Damn, I didn't know America was contagious...
It's been the strategy of the right wing here since forever - get in power sell out as much they can (and for some unfathomable reason for discount prices), fuck things up in general, leave it to a left wing government to salvage what can be saved while blaming them for public service being garbage so they can motivate selling out more when they have power again. It's a mix of blind idealists and profiteering scum that are in liaison with the right wing nationalist party with former nazi connections and obviously the Christian democrat leader that models the party according to the republicans is the most buddy-buddy with the fringe right.
And the populist right wing of course romanticises about the good days when everyone had housing and was safe and provided and so on - that was built solely by the left and the right wing fought them every step of the way and that they have since then torn down. Blatant lies and disinformation all the way.
But it is what people vote for. We get the societal break down we deserve.
EVERY instance of 'public-private' healthcare goes that route, touted as the wave of the future and a seamless melding of public interest and delicious capitalist pork, and then every single one of them gets drunk on the cash and goes toxic like this.
It's happening to Canada too. And France. And London.
Microloans, also called microfinances. Very popular in developing countries in South Asia, and also the same thing that is responsible for the suicide epidemic of farmers in India. With high interest rates and fixed time-period constraints, they're the most cruel and fucked up things to ever exist, they're worse than indentured serfdom.
Sounds like 'pay day loans' in the US.
Back in the day, a loan shark was a criminal who charged an outrageous 20% interest for money. Working class folks were at the mercy of these "six-for-fivers."
Ronald Reagan became President and now established banks could charge 35% or more.
(Looks at my credit cards)
Yall got any more of that 20% interest?
Yeah, a factory worker would get $5 and pay back $6 the next week. That was a terrible crime. Then Reagan deregulated the banks and it became business as usual.
To be fair, usury is much older plague than capitalism, but it's been one of capitalism roots, and capitalism cranked it up incredibly.
I'd like to add that there are good versions of "microloans"! I learned that there used to be (or still are, didn't check) non-profit " banks" in some parts of India (and South africa I think) that would give out small loans of a few dollars to a few hundred dollars (which can be quite a lot of money in India). There was no collateral and low interest, but a group of people had to apply for a loan together. Until the first loan was paid back, the rest of the group couldn't apply again. It was meant to provide financial backing and capital to microbusinesses (e.g. fishers, farmers, peddlers) that would otherwise be excluded from the financial market due to a lack of collateral and otherwise be forced to take high-interest loans.
I cannot find the exact quote but it was something like "If you don't grow, you're dying". This is the source of all enshittification. Companies are being forced by VCs to increase revenue every year to meet unreasonable revenue goals just to satisfy a handful of investors.
“Vote with your wallet” means more money gets you more votes.
Some users leaving Reddit/instagram/twitter is not a problem, especially considering network effects, but some advertisers leaving is a crisis.
I think you misinterpreted the phrase. "Vote with your wallet" means that if you're unhappy with a product/service, you stop using/paying for it.
So long as the capital markets were willing to continue funding loss-making future monopolists, your neighbors were going to make the choice to shop "the wrong way." As small, local businesses lost those customers, the costs they had to charge to make up the difference would go up, making it harder and harder for you to afford to shop "the right way."
https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/12/give-me-convenience/
Food for your thought.
Today I heard Meta has laid off workers because they brought their own food for lunch instead of buying it from the company cafeteria.
Well yes, but also no. Meta fired those folks because they were using their lunch stipend provided by meta for things other than lunch. Petty, given how much they were paying the employees, but almost certainly a breach of contract on the employee's part.
Meta is probably trying to do layoffs without paying layoff costs or taking the stock hit layoffs can cause. Which is still capitalist AF by any measure, lol. For fans of watching what kind of shit the oligarchy is trying now, Meta is definitely one to keep an eye on. Mark Zuckerberg has been moving very conservative very quickly lately.
A more recent example comes from the med-tech giant Abbott Labs, which used DMCA 1201 to suppress a tool that allowed people with diabetes to link their glucose monitors to their insulin pumps, in order to automatically calculate and administer doses of insulin in an "artificial pancreas." -eff.org
We joke about someday having to jailbreak our own organs, but we're basically already there.
An exoskeleton let a paralyzed man walk. Then its maker refused repairs.
Capitalists will say that it's fine for an economy to have a few capitalists own all capital and all physical and intellectual property while common people are only allowed to rent it from the capitalists at whatever rate the capitalist pleases. However, capitalists will also say that the evil of socialism is that you won't be allowed to own property. That's the most capitalist thing I'm aware of.
My boss once said to a group of new joinees including me," Eventually you will be able to afford subscription to all the streaming services."
Well, that was a lie.
I once read that there are some states in the U.S. where firefighters don't put out fires in houses that don't pay a monthly subscription.
I live in an area with a subscription fire service.
It’s not expensive - around $200/year. And if you don’t have a subscription they still come and put out your fire or cut you out of the car or whatever needs to be done. You just get a bill for $3000/hr/apparatus that responds.
But I still find it abhorrent. Just put it in my fucking taxes and be done with it. Jesus.
I live in an area with a subscription fire service.
I thought the earlier guy was doing a joke. I knew that those were a thing in the 1800's or something, but even today?
You just get a bill for $3000/hr/apparatus that responds.
That's pretty insane. So basically the firemen and ambulances are too expensive for the average citizen to use, and if you happen to be black, you probably don't want to call the cops either.
Great services.
Private fire fighters have been a thing since at least the 1600s.
No no. Not "since", but "in".
It genuinely shocked me those still exist in the states. That's fucking insane.
We have a somewhat different mentality about public safety here in Finland.
Motorcycle airbag vests that will not work if you aren't up-to-date on the subscription payments when you have a crash...
Hong Kong's subway system offers fare discounts if you use the entrances/exits that require you to walk through a mall, as part of their monetisation of spaces required to access public services
I see a private ambulance service driving around my town occasionally and it always makes my skin crawl
Some random company that sells fruits overthrowing another country's government; it's so ludicrous I'd say it's too silly to be the plot of a serious movie and like no no, actually this ludicrous story is actually real.
Charging money for supplies after people had there whole lives uprooted by a natural disaster. Cough cough hurricane helene
The purposeful degradation of repair.
My brother used to work for an SEO company. They charged clients to have their web sites on directories which would improve their Google pagerank… until Google updated the algorithm to penalize sites listed in these directories. The company quickly pivoted to charging the same clients to have them removed from the directories they had just charged them to be listed in.
The US Empire.
A peanut with a top hat and a monocle selling you other peanuts, to eat.
suppressing wages and social housing so that starvation and homelessness make labour cheaper
That person who was in a car that ended up crossing three lanes, hitting a pole and then hitting a tree. They declined an ambulance because they were scared of the ambulance bill - then got a bill for $150 for refusing the ambulance. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
That you can lease prison labor.
Projecting ads onto the tunnel walls off of a moving subway. Seen in mainland ~~Taiwan~~ China.
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