Excuse me, time is not a circle. Time is a cube.
But cubes have eight corners XD
You really wanna argue with that wall of text? Hehe
slavers just changed tactics. called employers on paper.
oooooooaaaahhhmmM 🐄
Man discovers that the same government that doesn’t pay for insulin or chemotherapy is willing to pay for COVID vaccine 🤔
There’s also the fact that rich people buying insulin for themselves is enough to keep them safe. Rich people vaccinating only themselves though won’t be anywhere near as effective.
Unvaccinated people just give a vaccine-resistant strain the chance to develop.
Completely unrelated to this meme, but does anyone have the meme of republicans not understanding hypotheticals that goes like
“Imagine you are [x]”
“But I’m not [x]? I’m [y]”
time is merely mans attempt to control his environment. clocks sole purpose is to create controllable sequences of events
Well, it isn’t free in the socialized healthcare countries, but taxes don’t go into the audit-dysfunctional defense budget and so you actually get your money worth (and others do too). But alas, people have their outgroups so we can’t have nice things.
The defense budget is entirely irrelevant to healthcare. We already spend multiple times the defense budget on Medicare and Medicaid, and another several times as much on health insurance premiums, copays, and coinsurance.
We could have universal healthcare without touching the defense budget at all, and it would still be cheaper than the system we currently have.
I’ll just say, the United States Marine Corps has passed two audits on a row, the only branch to pass an audit, period. And so it’s obviously possible, and the fact that others can’t do it needs to be investigated more thoroughly.
is that also why the timestamps are conspicuously missing from this screenshot?
Because covid is contagious. If one thing is worse than death, it’s death that spreads, also know as a plague. Orders of magnitude worse. They change everyone’s history, not just your family’s.
They are getting you used to taking emergency shots.
…no
COVID shots also save the lives of other people because of reducing disease transmission (fewer people sick means less transmission), which is acceptable for the most simpleton “What’s in it for me crowd”.
Meanwhile the socialized healthcare things are only acceptable for people who don’t want to see others suffer (i.e. who have empathy) and/or who can see how living in a country were other people have better lives also improves their own lives (i.e. who have social awareness) and/or who are aware than “one day I might be the one there” (i.e. reasonable intelligent and risk aware).
So it absolutelly makes sense that in countries were people are heavilly brainwashed to have simpleton zero-sum-game selfish views on social issues, COVID shots are an easier idea to sell (and even then, as we saw mainly in the US, it’s pretty easy to swindle the dumbest of the “What’s in it for me” crowd to think the COVID shots are actually bad for them and refuse to take them).
When smallpox was eradicated in the 1950s, it was achieved with something like 100 million doses of the vaccine, which was substantially less than the world population at the time (in the neighborhood of 2.5 billion). This is because scientists understood that the vaccine was not something for individual protection but was rather a weapon to protect the population as a whole (and annihilate the disease entirely) when coupled with a full understanding of how the disease spread.
Adding to your second paragraph, it also turns out that people who are healthy are more able to contribute to society, so even if you have zero empathy you’re going to want to provide for many of the basics that the US has increasingly striven to make unaffordable.
That would be part of the second rationale in the second paragraph, IMHO.
I guess calling it “social awareness” threw me off because to me that’s something completely different from what I’m saying.
It’s just basic economics (of countries whose economies are not based on resource extraction, which you can technically effectively do with a miserable and unhealthy populace).
Yeah, I just checked the definition of “social awareness” and I might have misused the expression, though I don’t quite know what would be the correct one to use to mean the awareness of how at multiple levels the lives of people around us can impact our own lives.
To me “social awareness” relates to how your actions impact the feelings of others, not so much the brutal math of the situation (which I would call Economics, which luckily happens to align with the empathetic angle in most countries).
The problem a lot of times is that the social impact doesn’t get time to be addressed before it gets stopped in peoples minds. Many people get to “healthcare is expensive, I can’t/don’t want to pay someone else’s healthcare. Forget the economy or social benefit, I can’t afford to pay it.” So the benefits are there, but when people are struggling it’s hard to ask them to see beyond their nose.
man if seizures and hypoglycaemic episodes were contagious that medicine would be cheaper
COVID shots weren’t given away for free, the government paid corporations for it with public money.
Public trials for new therapies cost billions. Pfizer and Moderna got this stage for free.
I don’t frequently have these kinds of debates in public, but the closest I’ve ever gotten to talking a vaccine skeptic out of their position was when I came from the angle of, “these shots are free because insurance companies know they work, and they would rather eat the cost of 100 vaccines than have to pay for every hundredth person to be hospitalized with the flu for 3 days, which costs THEM $40k.”
Then they start going on about how the vaccine was rushed into production, and it didn’t need to go through FDA approval, which like yeah it was, but that doesn’t mean it’s unsafe.
For the most part the FDA is a giant waste of time, yes they do prevent unsafe products from getting onto the market but 99% of the time the product is safe, and the FDA is just this giant ball of red tape you have to cut through.
and it didn’t need to go through FDA approval, which like yeah it was, but that doesn’t mean it’s unsafe.
It was rushed, yes. And it didn’t go through the regular FDA process.
It did, however, go through the full FDA process. What they did was run stages of the FDA approval process in parallel that normally needed to be done in series. All the same steps were done, but they were doing stage III testing at the same time they did Stage II testing.
And, funnily, the vaccine which actually caused health problems wasn’t an MRNA, it was a traditionally developed vaccine (the J&J shot).
99% of the time the product is safe, and the FDA is just this giant ball of red tape you have to cut through.
Safe and effective are 2 different things that the FDA tests. Drugs aren’t always safe and they aren’t always effective. FDA testing forces pharmaceuticals to prove both things before giving their drugs to people.
It’s a lot of red tape, but it’s there because of things like Vioxx (an FDA failure and a result of “just trust us, it’s safe”) which ended up killing/injuring over 10000 people.
Yeppp, insurance companies want you to have to have health insurance, be perfectly healthy as long as possible, and die or recover quickly when you get something expensive like cancer. Vaccines are basically always going to be a good value proposition for them because most people should get them which spreads the cost of R&D and manufacturing out between most people in a way that hospital stays and designer drugs can’tm
Why would it matter to them whether they pay out for hospitalisation, or pay out for flu shots? The payouts don’t matter. We saw that with the banking crisis. They’re covered by bigger insurers who are covered by government bailouts because they’re too big to fail. All that matters is that premiums keep coming in.
Insurance companies can write off excess payments anyway. Those making the decisions undoubtedly have hedged portfolios, so if the company they’re working for goes under it doesn’t matter as long as other companies in their portfolio benefit. Many will even take out short positions on their own failing company and profit from its demise.
Gone are the days when CEOs actually cared if their particular company’s on-book expenditures matched its income.
The payouts don’t matter.
All money out matters to an insurer.
Those making the decisions undoubtedly have hedged portfolios
Insurance is generally written on risks that are not hedgable. What they care about is making sure their risks don’t all happen at the same time.
I’m not talking about the insurance, I’m talking about the people making decisions for that company. They will have a share portfolio which forma that major part of their personal income which will be hedged. As such, so long as the broad capitalist system keeps extracting wealth, they will keep earning. Their own company is often little more than a side project compared to their assets.
It’s truly shocking to me that people are still falling for this notion of the wise, financially prudent, CEO - even after the 2008 crash and all the fallout. People are still invested in this mythology around how businesses work.
I guess with healthcare people need the comfort. After all, seeing medicine like any other product of modern industry is a pretty scary leap, so people have to build a narrative around it by which it’s magically protected.
It isn’t. It’s the same as literally every other product on the market. You can wrangle it in as much storytelling as you like, but nothing is going to make production of pharmaceuticals any different to production of paint, oil, cars, tanks, and any other thing you can think of. The most profitable practice is chosen and that often is to the detriment of ordinary people.
CEOs still only care because they can get a bigger bonus.
I could give you an answer, but it could take forever, and it would not only make zero sense, but I can guarantee that it will only make you more confused and angry by the second— to the point that you’d …
Well, you wouldn’t like it, that’s for sure
I strongly suggest that you take what you have left, and move on. Vengeance =! Justice, and trying to get either in this world, wow, that’s just gonna get you dead.
The best any of us can hope for his peace, and you can only get that by moving on
So you’ve just given up on life? 😟
Odd how I said to find peace and “move on” but you heard “give up on life”
The issue is the ever encroaching line of “I need this for basic survival” while people who are extracting the means for survival can’t seem to understand why ignoring the problem doesn’t solve their anxiety or continuing societal failures ensuring more and more people fall below the line of basic autonomy and survival.
Like “why do the Gays need to make so much noise” meets society forbidding gay marriage and classifying that entire way of being a an “illness” to justify past and future abuses
I this case, those who don’t want to suffer a prolonged and more dangerous pandemic because a few people are still pushing the Andrew wakefield hyper debunked MMR autism narrative, or any other social issue that makes finding peace extra difficult because you or your love ones are directly suffering or dying from these problems.
It’s like, offering someone some mindfulness advice after your dad poisoned their dog. Doesn’t help as much as you’d think.
OK, at this point, I’m convinced that there’s been enough of a misunderstanding between the both of us that continuing this conversation isn’t going to be constructive. How, why, or even when it happened, I’m not exactly sure, but I’ll just take the blame for it. I apologize for clearly wasting your time.
