My dad also spent days dying from extremely aggressive cancer, being in unimaginable amounts of pain, with all of his organs slowly shutting down, his limbs becoming swollen from pooling blood, unable to drink, unable to eat, crying about how much pain he's in and how much he wants to go home. And all the hospital could do was give him enough morphine to knock him our and we waited by his bedside for 4 days until he finally drew his last breath, probably due to lack of fluids at this point.
Tell me - where does the "morality" stand here compared to him proactively ending his own life with a drug before all of this happened, if he had such an option and decided to take it? How is what he went through morally better like some people say it is compared to euthanasia(I don't know if you think that, but it's a common argument). There's no dignity in any of this.
Well that entire dogma is giving us monsters like Mother Theresa who thought that by letting people in her care suffer she made it more likely they will make it to heaven - and well, the Catholic Church has agreed with that interpretation and made her a Saint.
This was touched upon in a game called Indika released this year......there's a story there how a guy ended the suffering of his young child who was in constant pain, and was told by a priest during confession time "well you see by killing your son you condemned your soul to eternity in hell, but your child is now definitely in heaven, so actually you did a good thing by sacrificing yourself!". And so the guy went and killed the rest of his family, having come to a logical conclusion that he can't get any more condemned to hell than he already is, but if he guarantees that his entire family goes into heaven then surely that's an absolutely amazing thing to do. I don't know if this was based on a true story or not, but the logic totally applies.
It seems to be a fundamental truth of human existence that we're all extremely critical of others for how quick they are to believe nutty stories about people they disagree with, while sharing that fault. Tribalism is wired deeply into our DNA.
Why is the alternative dogma egocentric hedonism? To me, the alternative to what she was doing is "dogma" of caring for another human. If they need help, if they cry out in pain, help them - not collect imaginary points of sending them to heaven. Not sure where egocentric hedonism plays into this.
You’re replying to someone who presumably thinks that if they personally didn’t have religion, they would be an egotistic hedonist. They don’t realise that doesn’t apply to many other people. I think with people like that, we’re better off if they keep their religion.
I'm doubtful. Way more people are willing to hurt others if they think it's for the greater good compared to people willing to hurt others just for personal gain.
>>Would you go to work without being paid? I wouldn't.
Do you think doctors and nurses work for free in countries with socialized healthcare?
They do get paid. A lot if you're a specialist too - it's a very lucrative field to be in. Admittedly, not for everyone - nurses and junior doctors usually don't get paid very well, but it's my understanding that in US it's not like these professions make bank either.
>>if there was a ton of people who wanted to found, fund, and work at nonprofit health insurance companies.
That's the whole point that Americans are missing - you don't need the insurance companies in the first place, if the entire system is owned by the public. You go to a hospital, you get an operation done and that's it, at no point is there anyone sitting there are processing your "claim" - if the operation is one allowed by the system(and it almost certainly is) then it's just done and the system pays for it from general taxation budget. No one negotiates rates with the hospital, argues about your excess or premiums or in or out of network coverage. Health insurance is something you get for travelling abroad, like if you have an accident while skiing and need a helicopter to get you out, not for visiting a doctor or a hospital.
Im responding to a comment that thinks the following is crazy and wrong.
>When you remove profit from the equation, you also remove the incentive to increase supply.
Yes, socialized system countries have doctors because they pay doctors, ensuring supply. This proves the point above.
If you pay people to do something, you get more of it.
Health insurance companies dont provide healthcare. They dont stich you up or manufacture pills. They are in the business of vetting and denying claims to ration healthcare provided by others.
>No one negotiates rates with the hospital, argues about your excess or premiums or in or out of network coverage. Health insurance is something you get for travelling abroad, like if you have an accident while skiing and need a helicopter to get you out, not for visiting a doctor or a hospital.
It works different in various socialized systems, but there is always someone negotiating with the hospital, the workers, and the manufacturers. Sometimes this is the government, sometimes it is private insurance.
I dont know which country you are talking about, but almost every country has some sort of Health Insurance. What differs is the level of involvement by the citizens in selecting it.
A classic example would be Germany, which is a multiple payer system with both government and private insurance. 85% percent of people have the government health insurance, which is paid by employers and employees and mandatory. the government manages and negotiates rates for this plan. You can opt out and get private insurance instead, and those insurers have sperate negotiations and offer different services. There is also supplemental insurance, also private, also negotiated separate.
From my understanding Germany is an outlier among countries with socialized healthcare because their system is either straight up reliant on insurance or is modelled after insurance-like systems. My experience is based on Poland and UK. And sure in the UK you pay for "national insurance" which partially funds the NHS, but the point is that it's almost irrelevant to your coverage - as long as you live in the UK legally you are entitled to treatment, whether you pay NI or not. Again, the difference(imho) is that if you go to a hospital and a doctor there decides you need an operation done, it only goes through a cursory check to make sure the operation is covered and then it's carried out. It doesn't go to some central office where someone checks if you as a person X are entitled to have this done or not, it's not a "claim" like a one you would make with an actual insurance company.
And yes, of course you can supplement that with private insurance if you wish, but vast majority of people don't.
And yes, of course the government negotiates with providers - but when you get treated that's not something that affects you. You don't get a bill that says "your treatment was £10k, but the goverment will only pay £5k, cough up the rest". In fact no one(patients) gets any bills ever.
I'm pretty sure that UK is the outlier, where healthcare providers are state employees. Wikipedia says the NHS is the largest employer in Europe with 1.4 million employees.
I think the vast majority of countries have some sort of a situation with the government as at least one of the payers, and Private health care providers.
I completely agree that the US is an outlier in how involved the patient is in the payment of their healthcare, and the fact that they can be left with the bill instead of the provider if the insurance is denied.
On a psychological level, I think people are more frustrated by being offered care that they can't afford and dealing with uncertain coverage then not being offered the care at all.
I'm a huge proponent of healthcare reform in the US. That's sad, I think one of the biggest problems with getting it past is unreal expectations. Americans have a caricature of European healthcare in their mind that is totally inaccurate.
It’s still an insurance system though, whether it’s publicly owned or privately. There are still bureaucrats who decide what is covered and what is not, and they make that decision for the entire population. Things like cutting edge cancer treatments (often developed in the US) are many years late arriving to public healthcare systems. And many expensive treatments are simply not covered, or covered as second or third line (eg. immune therapy), when patients in the US with appropriately good insurance receive them as first line with far better outcomes.
> No one negotiates rates with the hospital
No one negotiates period. Coverage decisions are made unilaterally by government officials, and services that those officials deem too expensive are simply not offered. The same issue exists with medical equipment. The wait time for an MRI is absurd in eg. Canada because government only funded so many machines. In the states there are simply more machines, because supply was more elastic, and more freely
able to meet demand.
Sure. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure American healthcare system can be amazing in certain cases, and like you said, in specific instances the "market demand" is able to solve issues that socialized systems struggle with. But the same is true in the opposite direction - plenty of stories of people being denied lifesaving care because insurance companies decide it's not worth it. People who have their cancer treatment stopped because their employer changed the insurer and the new insurer has to do a full re-evaluation before they approve the treatment to continue, so in the meantime you get no cancer drugs for months while they do their process. And so on and so on. We could both do this I'm sure.
>>when patients in the US with appropriately good insurance receive them as first line with far better outcomes.
The problem I have with that is basically you're saying the quality of the treatment depends on what insurance you have. In socialized healthcare everyone gets the same treatment.
And in fact this is reflected in the average quality of care received on average, with outcomes in US being much worse than elsewhere. US has mortality from "preventable causes" twice as bad as Australia, Japan or France(paragraph 5). So in US few people get amazing care better than anywhere else. And most people get worse care than anywhere else.
>>Things like cutting edge cancer treatments (often developed in the US) are many years late arriving to public healthcare systems.
Obviously it's hard to make a general statement on this because every country has varied policies around this. But to share an anecdote - my own dad was enrolled into an experimental programme at a leading oncology hospital in Poland because he had a very rare and ultra aggressive cancer which had no known treatment other than a brand new(then) Glivec, which wasn't even approved for that cancer yet, but he had the whole course of his treatment fully funded under our socialized healthcare. In those very very rare cases where regular treatment is not available there are avenues to explore experimental treatments, and they then serve to direct general treatment plans for the rest of the population. Again, this is a specific example from one country.
You would concede that, as a consequence of imposing involuntary obligations on their citizens, socialized systems are less free? And you would also concede that reasonable people can disagree about the priorities of their values, and that valuing personal autonomy over collective well-being is a reasonable position?
> people being denied lifesaving care because insurance companies decide it's not worth it
You get what you sign up for. Like in any business transaction, doing your due diligence and understanding the details of both parties obligation is table stakes. We also have courts precisely for cases when such disputes become intractable.
> so in the meantime you get no cancer drugs for months while they do their process.
No one is stopping you from paying for the drugs yourself. Insurance will reimburse you once they validate your claim. Bureaucracy takes time.
> the average quality of care received on average
And the quality of care on the upper end is markedly worse in many ways. Wealthy people from all over the world travel to the US for their medical procedures for a reason. You're effectively arguing that net-contributors to society (people who pay a lot of taxes) should accept an increase in their tax burden for the privilege of a degradation in their personal access to and quality of care, in order to bring up the average. I hope you appreciate just how directly this opposes the interests of this class.
> From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs
You can't have a system like this in a free country. I want the freedom to associate (in an insurance pool) alongside other people with a similar risk profile to myself (eg. no drinking/drugs/smoking, daily exercise, good sleep, healthy body composition) to the exclusion of others. I want my insurance company to carefully scrutinize its applicants and claimants, on my behalf, to ensure that my interests are being well-represented. Insurance does not mean absolution from personal responsibility.
The government still negotiates. Refusing to buy a product/service at X rate is a negotiation, and there is a back and forth with providers/manufacturers.
Same for state employed healthcare professionals, which have salary set by the state.
I imagine that's what the start of the French revolution felt like too - one day you could walk down the streets of Paris as a noble minding your own business, the next day you had your head chopped off because people got fed up. Not saying that this is what's happening in the US right now, but I imagine the societal feelings of anger against "the elite" are similar.
I had the same thought actually - what did it for me was realizing that I started to eat meat 3 times a day - breakfast, lunch and dinner all had meat in them, almost always. But when I was growing up in Poland, you'd have meat maybe 2-3 times a week - not because we were poor, but purely because no one looked at a meal of vegetable dumplings(or many other meat-free dishes) as something worse compared to meat - it had the same cultural status as a porkchop. But now I live in the UK and not eating meat for dinner is almost immediately seen as weird, or "oh you're a vegeterian now?" - no....I just don't eat meat for every meal? Why is this immediately seen as suspicious? And again, no one in Poland ever thought of these meals as "vegetarian" - they were just normal meals, not a special lifestyle choice.
My parents both grew up on farms and for them meat was something you had on Sundays. The belief that a meal is only complete with meat seems pretty new.
Vegetarian dishes are common. Vegan dishes are a tiny bit more rare.
- Pickle soup is a classic (use a recipe with fermented pickles, which are pretty easy to make at home, but larger grocers often also sell them refrigerated as a kosher product). Aside from the sour cream it's naturally vegan, and a vegan sour cream might work fine.
- Borscht is a delicious beet soup.
- Wild mushroom perogies are also pretty close, save for egg and sour cream in the dough. Vegan substitutes would definitely work there, else if you experiment a bit with the hydration a basic hot water and flour dough would be close.
- Cabbage soup is similar to pickle soup in spirit (using sauerkraut, another lacto-fermented vegetable).
- Placki Ziemniaczane (somewhat similar to US hash browns) is often served with mushroom sauce. Sometimes it'll have egg as a binder, but that's not essential for a very similar dish (replace it if you'd like, or add a bit more flour and water, or just leave it out).
- Braised sauerkraut
- Krupnik is a barley soup, often made with meat stocks, but vegetable stocks aren't bad either.
That's a fair callout. I think the best borschts I've eaten had dairy, but somehow I had bright purple soups in mind when I wrote that and forgot about the others.
With any luck, a vegan sour cream ought to get you to that pink classic. No promises though, and the purple version is also great.
I'm not an expert on Polish dishes, but I learned that it's pretty easy to make any dish vegan if you are an average cook. If you live in a bigger cities, you'll find many meat alternatives. Pick the ones that you think comes closest to replace the meat in your dish. Replace butter with olive oil or margerine. Replace milk with oat milk (or soy milk).
Replacing cheese is the hardest, but there are increasingly better options now.
Because leading Islamic scholars have decided it's ok. Just like leading Jewish scholars have decided that even the most orthodox Jews can drink fresh water, even though all water everywhere in the world contains microscopic creusteceans. Religions and belief systems don't have to be perfectly logical(not in the "ah gotcha" scope anyway).
To be fair, all that does to me is highlight the inconsistency and illogicality of these archaic religious customs, which were rooted in sanitation concerns at a time when no one knew what bacteria was, but have become venerated as part of a global control mechanism by the elite.
Every good cult needs a list of low-stakes, illogical rituals, because they serve as nuclei for adherence to higher-stakes illogical beliefs and acts.
Unfortunately, science has made it increasingly difficult to justify the absolutism of many of these religious practices, and so somehow these religions skate by by saying, "oh we're just being practical and realistic" even though they continue to stray further from the dogma which defines their religious beliefs.
It shows you unequivocally that these religious institutions are more interested in maintaining power than adhering to their own belief systems.
You think that the average member of the public isn't aware that videos can be faked with AI, or non-AI special effects, and your source of data for this is "your own experience"? Really?
My family is mostly working class in an economically depressed part of the Virginia/West Virginia coal country, and every single one of them is aware of this. None of them work in tech, obviously. None have college degrees.
I maintain that the attitude driving this paternalistic, censorious attitude is arrogance and condescension.
A prime example of how broadly aware the public all over the world is of AI faked videos was the reaction in the Arab world to the October 7th videos posted by Hamas. A shocking (and depressing) percentage of Arabs, as well as non-Arab Muslims all over the world, believed the videos and pictures were fakes produced with AI. I don't remember the exact number, but the polling I saw in November showed it was over 50% who believed they were fakes in countries as disparate as Egypt and Indonesia.
>>isn't aware that videos can be faked with AI, or non-AI special effects
These two are very different things. My family believes all kinds of videos on the internet are fake. None of them have any idea what a tool like Sora can do. The gap between "oh this was probably special effects" to "you have to notice pixels shimmering around someone's hand to tell" is enormous.
>>My family is mostly working class in an economically depressed part of the Virginia/West Virginia coal country, and every single one of them is aware of this.
Your working class family has time to keep up with the advancements in generative AI for video? They have more free time than I do then. If we're sharing anecdotes about families then my family is from Polish coal country and their idea of AI is talking to your car and it responding poorly.
>>I maintain that the attitude driving this paternalistic, censorious attitude is arrogance and condescension.
I'm confused - who is displaying this "censorious" attitude here?
>> and your source of data for this is "your own experience"? Really?
Yes, really. I mean do you have anything else? You are also quoting things from your own experience.
On the other hand DJI has flown their regular consumer Mavic 3 Pro(although I bet it has been modified in some way) all the way to the top, so I have no doubt that with enough of them you could construct almost anything. Not that it would be allowed or even desirable by anyone there.
The helicopter flight that landed on the summit briefly was helped by some strong updrafts according to the pilot. It also looks like it was a number of flights.
I still vividly remember pictures of a strike on a kids hospital in the very first days of the war, where a 2 year old has been killed by a Russian missile. No one has been using that hospital as a military base at the time.
Nothing justifies this. There is no logic that could be twisted here to somehow make it look like it was OK for Russians to fire at those targets. In fact it isn't "OK" for Russians to fire at any targets within Ukraine, no matter their setup or positioning - I don't think it can be any clearer than this.
Which doesn't add up either. It's Ukraine's largest children hospital.
Meanwhile there is a sprawling military plant Artem nearby, which has been a target of multiple Russian missile strikes.
The Russian MoD said the hospital was hit by a malfunctioning Ukrainian anti-missile, but if you don't believe that, what do you think is more likely: that the military plant was the target and a Russian missile missed it, hitting a corner of the hospital building instead, or that the hospital was the target, but the missile failed in its attempt to kill scores of children being treated for cancer, which would be one of the most heinous war crimes imaginable?
I literally don't understand what point you're trying to make - even if Russia only accidentally hit a children's hospital.......they are still the ones firing the missiles. They are still killing children. They are still kidnapping and moving them to Russia. They are still killing their parents in a war that they started. The "legality" of their strikes on civilian infrastructure is an idiotic thing to discuss when they shouldn't be doing any strikes in the first place.
My point is that saying that Russia deliberately target hospitals is a lie.
>The "legality" of their strikes on civilian infrastructure is an idiotic thing to discuss when they shouldn't be doing any strikes in the first place.
And yet people are busy spreading atrocity propaganda. Why is that?
Russian representative at UN SC two days before that mentioned in his statement that Ukrainian military forced inhabitants out of a different maternity ward in Mariupol and made fire points there. [0]
Now look at the woman at 1:10 in your video. Here is a BBC's interview with her[1]:
"But Marianna told me there were no Ukrainian military stationed in the building where she was. She says she saw Ukrainian soldiers in the oncology unit in the building opposite the maternity unit."
My take is that at worst it was a strike made by mistake by people who were unaware that the hospital wasn't evacuated.
So then if Ukraine strikes Russian maternity hospitals or other civilian assets it would plausibly be because there were Russian soldiers stationed there?
>> Tracking me around the Internet is fine though, I don't mind and it has never harmed anyone
So if you had someone follow you around in your day to day life writing down your every activity, then sold the log of your comings and goings to hundreds of companies for cash - that wouldn't be a "harm" by your definition then, would it? Because that's effectively what's happening on the internet, but because people don't see immediate negative impact on their lives they don't see it as "harm".
No it's not what's happening. The sites I visit and the sort of information that is used for ads isn't sensitive. I'd happily share it
Also, most people wouldn't actually be harmed by what you're describing. It just wouldn't be super valuable data (we already know where you shop because the store and credit card will sell that information)
So like I said, you and I have very different definition. Using yours, you cannot harm someone who is in come or too young to understand what is happening to them. Similarily, if my personal information is being traded online for money a harm is being done to me, even if I'm not aware of these transactions taking place. I just don't expect we'll agree on this.
Even if you use a different definition you can acknowledge that someone else has a different view, and your original "if you don't like it, don't buy it" argument does not hold for that person.
Internet ads can in theory be turned on or off per user, it's no rocket science, so you could opt-in and everybody could be happy.
That's not what I said, you can harm somebody who is too young to understand. I'm claiming that nothing bad happens to you from information being traded about you, under whatever definition of "bad" you prefer
>>when something bad happens to someone, and the someone is aware of it
Well I mean that's pretty straightforward, is it not? Someone who is in a coma is not aware of what's happening to them = ergo, no harm is being done, no?
>>I'm claiming that nothing bad happens to you from information being traded about you
Ok let me follow this for couple more seconds then - any information? Or only specific kinds? Like if I take explicit pictures of my partner and put them on the internet(or sell them, to tick the "trading" box), but she _never_ finds out and it has zero impact on her life - was there harm being done?
>>"bad" you prefer
It's not a definiton of bad but a definition of harm we're differing on. You said no one was ever harmed by online tracking - I disagree on that point.
My dad also spent days dying from extremely aggressive cancer, being in unimaginable amounts of pain, with all of his organs slowly shutting down, his limbs becoming swollen from pooling blood, unable to drink, unable to eat, crying about how much pain he's in and how much he wants to go home. And all the hospital could do was give him enough morphine to knock him our and we waited by his bedside for 4 days until he finally drew his last breath, probably due to lack of fluids at this point.
Tell me - where does the "morality" stand here compared to him proactively ending his own life with a drug before all of this happened, if he had such an option and decided to take it? How is what he went through morally better like some people say it is compared to euthanasia(I don't know if you think that, but it's a common argument). There's no dignity in any of this.
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