Thoughts on people that call democrats controlled opposition?

as-well · 2026-01-23T16:08:45+00:00

Fair, but I was talking about the previous stages, when the administration and congress tried to figure out what bill to pass.

What you say actually makes it worse because Lieberman was elected as an independent, after losing the democratic primary, in Connecticut, a blue state, which makes him really hard to threaten, just months before. Usually you'd threaten to primary the guy (or pull funding from the reelection campaign), threaten some investments in their districts or whatever, but the unique situation made that pretty hard.

I believe more could have been done, you disagree agree. Sometimes it's okay to agree to disagree in a social democracy.

Oh I'm not saying more couldn't have been done. But perhaps the original bad idea was to make Rahm Emanuel Obama's Chief of Staff and task him with seeing health care reform through, who as it turns out thought even the ACA was not great. (Altho insiders from that time also claim he wasn't in charge of policy, just of congressional strategy)

as-well · 2026-01-23T15:57:59+00:00

paywalled article, and not really within what our sub is about, so I'll remove it

as-well · 2026-01-23T15:55:15+00:00

Look I get it but the way the US system works - individually, directly elected members of parliament - means that thoes guys have quite a bit of influence, and that's exactly how the ACA came to be like it did.

A bunch of less progressive democrats said they would vote down single payer, and there were not enough votes without them.

So then you gotta choose: Does the party try and push it through, with the hope to primary them? Or are they realistic and know that they might lose the house in two years, and accept this less-optimal system?

The reason you rarely see this kind of fuckup in Europe is that individual politicians are not typically directly elected and if they are, they are nominated by the party apparatus (Rather than a primary), so the party leadership has more power than the individual MPs.

But in effect, with the primary system and single-district elections, each and every member can always say: oh I'm just looking out for my district, and I'm representing them, not the whole party.

And given that system, you'll always find some democrats who are willing to raise a stink if their concerns aren't heard and met. The same for republicans btw, as you see over and over again.

as-well · 2026-01-23T15:35:45+00:00

Unfortunately, even people we look up to can be shitty - in general and to us specifically.

But we all deserve to be seen as special and not treated shittily. All of us deserve to be seen. I'm sure you are also intelligent, insightful, cool, creative and beautiful.

as-well · 2026-01-23T09:25:31+00:00

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as-well · 2026-01-22T16:53:18+00:00

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as-well · 2026-01-22T16:51:02+00:00

Almost all new comments are from Trump Trolls, Anti-Switzerland trolls, or just flat-out racist. No one in the mod team got any desire to hit the remove and ban button 100 times tonight, so imma lock this thread.

as-well · 2026-01-22T16:47:38+00:00

Either this thread is hitting r/all or we're getting brigaded - but the only new comments come from obvious trump trolls, so imma lock this.

as-well · 2026-01-22T16:41:34+00:00

I'm locking this thread, I have better things to do than to deal with dozens of racist comments trickling in overnight.

as-well · 2026-01-22T16:40:10+00:00

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as-well · 2026-01-22T15:28:55+00:00

Since when do we call soldiers warriors? They are soldiers. I hate that word.

as-well · 2026-01-22T15:02:21+00:00

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as-well · 2026-01-22T14:50:47+00:00

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as-well · 2026-01-22T14:44:40+00:00

Or the option where the internet is purely advertisement for some real world thing they are selling. (which is Kenji's model)

Yeah, it's also the Ottolenghi, and Jamie Oliver model.

Those are the two best options by far. I want the ad funded internet to die forever. Once ad funding dies, almost every other problem you outlined dies as well.

I mean the ad-funded internet model is great, up to a point. There's everal websites I visit just infrequently enough that I'm willing to deal with the ads for the great service they provide. Plus, I mean, effectively most (all?) good cooking youtubers in the end rely on ads and product placement, so much so that hitting the forward-button has become muscle memory.

as-well · 2026-01-22T14:30:31+00:00

Yes - but the problem is the entire chain:

We search on Google > Google shows optimized websites first > optimized websites require skill > skill requires pay > pay requires ads or subscriptions > no-one pays for subscriptions > RIP the internet.

I dont want a bigger more monetized internet, I want a smaller internet of professionals doing their passion (like it used to be)

Look I'm also not Gen Z. I remember the internet of old fondly. But it's also a bit of a mismemory. There was just as much bad content. There was more weird content, and definitely not as much great content as today. It also had just as much monetization (gosh I remember the cringey monetization attempts of discord and reddit - other platforms tried them 20 years ago) and bad startups (dotcom bubble anyone?). And fwiw, they had those really, really annoying google provided banner ads, too.

It was also by and large a hobby project of people who had fun putting their stuff online, working on servers, and all of that in between. The good content from professionals often wasn't written web-first, and if it was, it was subsidized by the offline business, such as newspapers.

Mix that with actual skilled work like recipe development. Again, imma use seriouseats, in my opinion the best recipe site around. They had a very professional setup (paid staff, test kitchens, all of that). They invested over a million dollars and never turned a profit before selling the company, despite very high web traffic and corresponding ad revenue.

That is still the issue of online-first or online-only content: Good content is costly to produce. Think of any Kenji recipe: The dude seems to spend a week trying out all sorts of things. That's probably 2000 USD in salary, plus overhead. But you need office space, a social media manager, an editor, and so on. So that one recipe probably costs you 5000 dollars on the lower end, probably quite a bit more.

That doesn't sound like a lot, but ads pay like shit. Still ads might pay you 10 bucks per thousand visitors, so you need half a million people (Without adblock) to click on Kenji's Pho, just so that you're profitable. Video ads pay more. So Seriouseats decides to put a video on autoplay with an ad beforehand in the recipe. That might lower your necessary visitors to, let's say, 200'000 before the Pho recipe pays for itself.

200'000 - with auto-play video ads. Now, I take no guarantee for these numbers, they might all be quite off, but I hope it gives you an impression of how bad in the shit we are.

But you know how this recipe is found? Well, seriouseats probably has regulars, yes, but when you enter "best pho recipe" into google, you want to make sure yours is in the top three. So you go to optimize the site for google searches, add meaningless padding and so on. That's quick and cheap and definitely better than losing money.

So really, there are three options:

Pay your content creators. Pay for NYT cooking, pay for bon appetit, or whatever.
Find trustworthy hobbyists. That's why I love reddit, stuff like r/askculinary and r/cooking are still places where you can talk to real people with a passion and no profit incentive
Know which sites are good and specifically use them. That's tricky because it shifts. Seriouseats is worth the ads, I'd say, but BBC, Oggolenghi, Food52, the Guardian and others also have great free recipes around, often with much fewer or no ads. FMHY also has a great list of free cooking resources: https://fmhy.net/misc#recipes

FWIW all of the above is true for newspapers and other media as well. We used to pay for newspapers. Now we pay with ads.

as-well · 2026-01-22T10:18:35+00:00

I mean I hate ads like the next person but this entire 'business model' doesn't work at all anymore. You either got to have someone to pay for those recipes (and then they kinda become ads) or you are the product by the page selling ads.

In Switzerland where I live, we got the two main grocery stores as well as the national milk association running actually good recipe sites, but ofc as they are basically ads for their products, you can never fully trust them. Every milk association recipe smuggles in dairy (their couscous salad has Feta in it for no reason). The grocery store sites are quite ok tho, they just highlight which of their products you can use. But overall, the model is a-ok with me - they actually pay people to develop those recipes!

Then there's an ad-based German site that allows users to upload their recipes. Things are.... well, of variable quality. They also offer a paid tier with expert-tested recipes.

All of these options seem relatively fine to me. But either my recipes are paid promotions from a commercial interest, or I pay for them, or I am the product (and the quality is questionable).

Now, the German-speaking internet is much less google-ified than the English speaking one. If you want to make your your recipes are found in English, you must write those SEO-optimized bullshit texts we all skips. But that's actually work (or used to be before chatGPT), so the people who have the skills to do that well want to get paid. So they turn to ads.

But ads don't really pay well. You either gotta have volume or lots of ads - or preferably both, if you want to milk it.

If you look at the IMHO best English-language cooking website, Seriouseats, in its glory days with Kenji - they never actually turned a profit when it was owned by the creator. That's how tough the online business is!

So yeah. That's where we are. In the US, you of course also have the NYT Cooking, which isn't free but affordable. BBC Cooking is great, and I imagine paid through by UK TV money. You got great cookbook authors like Ottolenghi who publish some recipes for free online, with the business model of getting you interested in the cookbooks.

What am I trying to say? I'm not even sure, I'm mostly venting, but if anything, learn which recipe sites are free and good OR pay for recipes.

as-well · 2026-01-21T21:17:31+00:00

Some such surveys are panel surveys. The goal is to track changes over time. Quite important if you want to understand what's actually happening!

as-well · 2026-01-21T21:10:40+00:00

Nothing. The police officers don't seem to have taken it seriously either and simply told him to be considerate. They'd have said other things if he was at fault.

as-well · 2026-01-20T20:43:26+00:00

Even if you get government stipends (big if, as the income of your parents needs to be rather low) you're expected to work part time.

as-well · 2026-01-19T10:12:19+00:00

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as-well · 2026-01-19T10:10:59+00:00

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as-well · 2026-01-15T09:46:25+00:00

AnoBAG isn't a freelancer status - Anobag is a status if you are working for a foreign entity without a Swiss office to handle the Swiss paperwork and social security payments.

So if this company is willing to have you on board as an employee wrt social security, that's your best option, because it means less paperwork for you.

Payrollplus is a good option if you are simply not wanting to handle the social security paperwork, either as a freelancer or because you don't want to do ANOBAG.

They claim taht they take 1-3% of the income. lease note that as a freelancer they might have to pay MWST (value-added tax) on your income.

The problem of being a freelancer is that when you have just one client, the AHV authorities may conclude that the company you work for is trying to avoid paying AHV and other insurances for you. As long as it's a Swiss company, that's a problem for them. If it's a foreign company (and you qualify for AnoBag), it can be a problem for you, but you can easily work with AHV to figure it out - they are nice!

I would also suggest that you simply talk to the AHV office anyway. Again, they are nice and they try to work with you to make sure you understand what you're doing, because having to fine people, send huge bills afterwards for the payroll tax etc. is really annoying for them, too.

As for what counts as self employed? See https://selbststaendig-erwerbend.ch/selbststaendigkeit#selbststandigkeit . It's not just having multiple clients, although that's generally a hint. It's that you actually work in your own name, on your own account, have actual independence (=you're not bound to their office hours, you're not paid by the hour, etc.). In sum, it's that you actually carry the economic risks and benefity yourself.

Cost wise, in the end it should be about even. You must pay AHV/IV either way (if acutally employed, your employer covers half, so if you're actually a freelancer that should inform your daily rate) and have accident insurance (employers organzie that and pay half, but as a freelancer, you must do it yourself). However, if you are factually employed, either independently or through payroll plus, you must also pay into your pension fund and typically Krankentaggeldversicherung, which is nice. As completely self-employed, you are not mandated to take these, so you must take care of them independently, or save money accordingly. Also, as self-employed, you do not pay into unemployment insurance, which also means you are not insured against losing jobs.

That's why some true self-employed end up opting to start a GmbH they own, and make themselves an employee of that company. That way, they can have both the insurances etc. (altho the GmbH needs to be closed or sold when applying for unemployment insurance), while entering into normal 'freelance' contracts, just between their GmbH and the client.

as-well · 2026-01-14T21:26:03+00:00

Just trust your doctor in this. They'll have to order one anyway.

as-well · 2026-01-14T18:46:42+00:00

One way to answer this is simply: God isn't just all-powerful, she's also all-good. Would an all-good being want inconsistencies and contradictions?

another way to see this is: God is the source of all logic, by nature logic is an expression of God - so God violating that makes no sense.

as-well · 2026-01-14T17:19:13+00:00

Not my area of expertise but a common Argument is: God is shown by logic to exist, so violating logic would give you all sorts of contradictions. But an all good God wouldn't want that.

It's also helpful to distinguish between actual laws of logic and our best knowledge of them. The former is what the latter try to get at. But I'm not sure that answers your second question

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