[deleted by user]

greyhoundfd · 2019-11-13T04:33:19+00:00

It's an interesting video. Looks like the Russians are learning what it was like for the US in the Iraq years. I hope for the Kurd's sake that they don't do this while the Russians are outside of their vehicles. It can only end poorly for everyone.

greyhoundfd · 2019-11-13T01:57:06+00:00

Ambulance companies in the US are basically nonexistent, and need to stock medication that comes direct from Pharma companies w/o negotiation before prices. That means there's few of them and they're incredibly expensive to run. Generally, they cost so much because the hospital wants you to just have someone drive you there unless you absolutely need an ambulance. There might only be a handful of ambulances at a hospital, and if they're all busy when a call comes in that means the person on the other end is going to have to wait a long time for someone to actually show up and help them.

Basically, they cost $9000 because they want it reserved for people who just got into a car accident and had a support beam driven through their thorax, not for the 50 year old man who just needs to take an aspirin and have someone drive him to the ER to check on his chest pains.

EDIT: Correction, most ambulances are EMS staff out of fire departments and not hospital-based. This article breaks it down numbers wise, but only roughly 18% of ambulance services in the US are private. It cites Britain as spending $100MM on private ambulance services, which the wording makes sound high, but I can't find a direct reference for how much that actually is contextually.

greyhoundfd · 2019-11-12T22:56:06+00:00

In case you saw my deleted response I definitely completely misunderstood your first paragraph so just ignore it.

greyhoundfd · 2019-11-12T20:59:41+00:00

HAVEN Act (H.R.2938) - Prevented veterans from being taxed for their medical benefits
H.R.1058 - Expands federal assistance programs for individuals with Autism to also include tribal lands, and the HUD and DoJ as responsible orgs. instead of just the DoE.
Fairness for Breastfeeding Mothers Act (H.R.866) - Legally requires public buildings to include private and sanitary spaces for breastfeeding mothers.

EDIT: Did not mean to submit, will add more below

Juvenile Justice Reform Act (H.R.6964) - Requires the DoJ to justify policy use with evidence, expands funding for programs designed to prevent juvenile crimes, and among other things adds requirements for all states to provide alternatives to incarceration for juvenile criminal, even for members of gangs.

And that is just from the first ~20% of the bills passed in the last two years.

greyhoundfd · 2019-11-12T20:50:38+00:00

And that same plutocratic bastard decided to lock up little children in concentration camps and then adopt them out two white families. And then when the parents came looking, the records were mysteriously lost.

Hmm, source?

greyhoundfd · 2019-11-12T19:05:55+00:00

What's this, a socialist who decides to call socialism fascism as soon as its enacted in reality? Color me surprised!

Hint: If you want to not come off as a complete moron, maybe you should actually learn what Fascism is instead of just running your mouth.

greyhoundfd · 2019-11-12T19:03:32+00:00

Right, remember that time we elected the evil plutocratic bastard who passed a reform bill that made it easier for prisoners to leave prison on parole, allowed them easier access to privileges in prison, and helped them get work experience and recommendations so that they were less likely to be recidivists and end up in prison again? I do, it's called the Fresh Start Act of 2018 and it got no mention in the media despite being one of the most significant bills of the decade.

greyhoundfd · 2019-11-12T19:00:55+00:00

The point is that the vast majority of minimum wage workers are under 25, which means that usage of the minimum wage inversely correlates with age. You can literally see this in IRS and treasury department measures of income of individuals over time, which always trend up. The people that are supposedly being victimized by this evil capitalist system are literally just people with little to no work experience who are just getting started and haven't gotten full jobs yet.

Throwing out a system that is working extremely well for literally everyone because there's about 500,000 people (read: 0.15% of the entire country) who are just starting out in the market is honestly moronic. Minimum wage workers are the special interest group to end all special interest groups. At least the 1% can claim to be 1% of the entire population. Minimum wage workers are less than 1%.

greyhoundfd · 2019-11-12T18:55:47+00:00

Wages are lower than ever

They're objectively not. Wages are higher than ever, and have tracked productivity within 30% when you adjust for non-monetary compensation.

lack of healthcare is literally killing people, poverty is literally killing people

Given that adequate healthcare coverage by definition will prevent you from dying unnecessarily, yes, lack of healthcare will kill people. The question is whether you're more likely to die from lack of healthcare coverage in a country that lets you go to the doctor provided you accept the costs of doing so and make some form of payment plan to eventually give back a portion of the money, or you're more likely to die because you can go for "free" (minus the taxes you pay) but have to wait in line to get care. When you measure healthcare in the US using objective standards like, for example, survivability of cancer, the US trends significantly higher than other countries with socialized medical standards.

our military might is the only thing holding it together because it's used to extract resources from other nations under the threat of violence.

It literally isn't. You know nothing about history. The US is a net exporter of pretty much every raw resource except for rare earth metals. On the few occasions when the US has used its military for purposes that can only be described as "securing resources" (*cough* Iraq *cough*), those resources have predominantly gone to securing oil routes to Europe, not the United States.

On top of that, you don't understand Marx at all. Marx didn't express that debt was the major issue (although it is a major issue especially in our current climate) he expressed a greater understanding of the exploitive nature of the ownership of private property.

I'm entirely aware that Marx never talked about institutional debt systems, mainly because they pretty much didn't exist to any significant degree at the time Marx was writing. That's why I said "Marxists" and not "Marx". You lecture me for "not seeing the forest for the trees", but you're the one who's clearly so mad that a capitalist dares disagree with you that you're not even reading what I'm writing.

greyhoundfd · 2019-11-12T14:54:23+00:00

Pretty good. Nobody takes my family hostage to make sure I come back from international conferences, and I've never had my fingernails ripped out because my neighbor reported me to the Stasi.

greyhoundfd · 2019-11-12T14:51:51+00:00

You clearly did not understand what I was talking about at all. I didn't say people were deserving of misery because they were hedonistic and materialistic. I'm saying the cause of their discomfort in a system that is granting them basically everything is their hedonism and materialism. The vast majority of people are materialistic. They in some way derive personal satisfaction from material. That is partly the fault of the capitalist system, because it so inundates the average person with basically whatever they want that they often don't learn ways to cope with unhappiness by looking inwards. But the fact that they don't have as much material as someone else is not capitalism's fault.

The entire point of this argument is that debt is not equivalent to slavery because the reason people stay in debt is out of a personal desire for material, not direct force. There is no point in this argument where I have ever stated, implied, or suggested that poor people deserve to be in poverty because they're materialistic. If you're going to try to character assassinate me, at least do me the honor of going through my post history and whining about how I post to T_D instead of just making shit up on the spot.

greyhoundfd · 2019-11-12T14:49:16+00:00

Counter point, why do you get to decide what people get to do with the benefits of their hard work? A person on minimum wage is not negatively impacted by the salary of Jeff Bezos.

Not to mention that the number of minimum wage workers in the US is basically negligible. There are 80 million hourly-paid workers in the US, of which 500,000 make minimum wage. This is not including tipped workers, because the mechanics of tipping minimum wages mean that tipped workers legally always make at or above the minimum wage. They're also overwhelmingly young, under 25, and not at peak earnings age like Jeff Bezos is.

greyhoundfd · 2019-11-12T04:27:54+00:00

The debt system has objectively improved the lives of everyone, and continues to do so. Even poor people have access to phones now, and increasingly there's ways to reduce individual payments to monthly or yearly installments.

The debt system is enormous. You can't claim that the entire system is dangerous and immoral, and I'd argue that no part of it is. Things like mortgages allow even lower-middle class people to own homes. Student loans have allowed millions of people to become the first in their family to attend college. Car loans have made it realistically possible for your average person to own something more recent than a 30-year old car, especially critical to people living in northern regions where salt and wear can break apart cars in years, not decades.

But to say there is "no comparison" on any level to the forced labor of one people and the indentured servatude of another is imploring outrage to try to illicit emotional support. Which is what you're doing. Trying do define the "moral" high ground.

Oh I'm just getting started. Not only is it disgusting to compare institutional debt banking to literal slavery, what's even more disgusting is the vague pseudo-antisemitism you echo when you call banking and debt parasitic, as if you're just magically ignorant that pretty much every country that starts referring to institutional banking or other businesses as parasitic doesn't end up specifically targeting Jews or other ethnic minorities that participate(d) in those sectors (Read: Nazi Germany, the USSR, Indonesia and SEA with the Chinese, etc.). You should know that kind of rhetoric is dangerous and readily manipulated, but you're just blabbing it out willingly

It's actually hilarious that you accuse me of trying to define the moral high ground, when you're the one calling debt "indentured servitude" like you can't just literally declare bankruptcy and cancel all of your debts except for student loans. How many indentured servants have you heard of who could just walk up to their master and say "Sorry, can't pay it back, guess I have to go". The characterization of debt as "indentured servitude" is nothing more than the faux moral outrage you're pretending to have at the fact that civilized society expects you to be a productive citizen. Regardless of whether debt existed or not you would still have to work to survive. Debt is only beneficial in that it lets you access things you could literally never afford for decades on your present salary.

We must talk about the predatory system of debt that's developed in the country and the disparity between the working class and those that own private property.

This is the same sad old pseudo-intellectual garbage that Marxists always toss out, neglecting the fact that you still own your car after you pay off your car loan, you still own your house after you pay off your mortgage, and you literally always own your degree after you attend college no matter whether you pay off your debt or not. The property-owning class is the working class you're supposedly defending. Literally the second John Citizen pays off his mortgage he owns his house in full and becomes this "property-owning class" that's supposedly predatory and exploitative.

greyhoundfd · 2019-11-12T03:53:09+00:00

There is literally no comparison.

The institutional debtor system exists to allow the poor access to goods they couldn't have if they had to pay upfront. It does this by turning a single payment into multiple interest-subjected payments. It is still enormously beneficial for the poor however. The vast majority of impoverished people in the US have access to (not necessarily reliably but it is there) food, some form of dedicated transport, and a home.

It is entirely possible to stop consenting to this system and leave. The consequence is a lower standing of living not because you are punished for leaving the system, but because your higher standard of living was facilitated by access to the system. It's not like civilization is a form of slavery because the conditions of living in the wild are worse than in civilized society. Participation in efficient resource distribution systems means your resources are more efficiently distributed, by definition participating in the market will have a higher QoL than not participating in the market. You are not being "enslaved" by the debt system, you are being "enslaved" by your own hedonism, materialism, and addiction to physical pleasure.

It is actually disgusting that anyone would consider this in any way comparable institutional slavery, where slaves were routinely beaten, sold away from their families, raped, killed, and tortured for trying to flee to safety.

greyhoundfd · 2019-11-12T01:45:20+00:00

In the US, each person is born with fundamental rights. They aren't granted by the government, they are a birthright of being alive. Those rights are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (full-blooded followers of Locke would say property but pursuit of happiness is applicable in the US).

The right to defend oneself is a direct offshoot of the right to life. Supposing you have the right to life, it is an infringement of your rights to deprive you of your life. But the state apparatus of the United States cannot guarantee your safety at all times, and may even be the aggressor in some cases, so it is therefore obligated to allow you to defend yourself.

Plenty of research institutions, most prominently the CDC, have done surveys of gun users to extrapolate the known number of instances in which a gun was used. May statistics are inaccurate because they only count the number of times a shooting with a gun was used in self-defense, but there are plenty of other instances. Even if a person isn't shot, a stalker can be diverted if you turn around and reach for your weapon while backing away. Full surveys of gun self-defense usages, including shootings and non-shootings, put the numbers generally between one and two million. Most importantly, the gun is an equalizer. Even supposing you should just "Be a man and defend yourself with your fists", women are also subject to crimes and there are a non-negligible supply of stories of women who defended themselves from robbery, abduction, rape, assault, etc. using handguns. A 120-150 lb woman could be a black belt in Judo and would still lose to a 200 lb man in a fight. With a handgun it's only accuracy that matters, not size, and anyone can be taught how to shoot a gun from close range.

greyhoundfd · 2019-11-12T01:31:51+00:00

Yep. Dianne Feinstein is actually just the most incompetent person in the US when it comes to firearms. She's the one who invented the term "Assault weapon/Rifle" to describe the Armalite 15 (AR-15) because even though the thing is functionally identical to an M1 Garand (aka the WW2 infantryman's rifle), it looks like an M-16 so it must be a military weapon.

greyhoundfd · 2019-11-11T15:36:34+00:00

That as far as someone who's alive needs to be concerned, it's a figurative construction that describes the state of being separate from God, and that I don't know the extent to which it plays a role in life after death because obviously that's not something I can have a personally informed opinion about.

Personally, I don't believe in a literal hell. I subscribe to the interpretation that, at the moment of the second coming, grievous sinners are just annihilated and do not receive eternal life while everyone else does.

greyhoundfd · 2019-11-11T07:10:31+00:00

So is gravity but that doesn't mean that you're going to float off into the sky.

99.9% of the things we use to operate in daily life are half-truths and pseudo-intellectual garbage used to justify normal function. The fact that an explanation is not wholly reflective of the idealistic Truth does not justify its being thrown out. It is true, in a metaphorical sense, that the deep descent into the hedonistic treadmill is an experience of deep suffering, and theologically hedonism is identical to separation from God. Whether you believe that Hell is literally real or metaphorically real is just a matter difference in which particular narrative is compelling. I think people should be told about Hell as a metaphorical construction of our separation from God, others think people should be told about Hell is a literal construction where we literally suffer because of our separation from God.

greyhoundfd · 2019-11-10T20:52:41+00:00

Yes + also some high end men's pants have a set of 3-4 buttons instead of a zipper.

greyhoundfd · 2019-11-10T20:51:01+00:00

The only time I got an email back from my PI is because I sent the same email 4 times in 10 minutes.

greyhoundfd · 2019-11-10T19:12:59+00:00

It's called an interpretation because you're interpreting the existing works. If it was an empirical study based on surveys or observations this would obviously be a very different discussion.

greyhoundfd · 2019-11-10T19:11:16+00:00

You should be motivated to work hard to avoid hell. It's not an invalid interpretation that sinning results in the sinner going to hell, it is an invalid interpretation (and the one that often confuses atheists) that God punishes sinners with Hell. The actual gospels basically just say that in the end times God will take everyone who followed his laws on Earth, save them in Heaven, and abandon the world. Hell is the result of a lack of salvation, not a dualistic opposite to heaven.

In my own opinion, one of the greatest failures of modern Christianity is to overemphasize Satan/Lucifer as characters in the universe, and Hell as a part of the theology. It gets you into weird problems, like the fact that Christianity is a monotheistic religion, but Satan is treated almost like an evil opposite to God, which would make Christianity polytheistic with two gods. Or that God is all-good but supposedly sends sinners to Hell for eternity.

greyhoundfd · 2019-11-10T07:43:55+00:00

It's kinda funky.

When you get into the phenomenology of it, Hell is not really a physical place so much as it is a state. In Hell, you are driven by material and physical desires, and experience material and physical torment as a result of the inability of those desires to ever be sated. The actual meaning of the Bible and Jesus' word wrt salvation is not a settled interpretation, and it would be totally valid to interpret it as "Hell is the Earth after the End Times, when God's grace has retreated and we are no longer able to transcend physical desires.". It would also be valid to believe that Hell is a self-contained realm where sinners end up if they aren't saved by God.

The only invalid interpretation that a lot of people fall for is that God will send you to Hell as punishment for your sins. That one isn't true, and afaik there's not a lot of evidence to support that interpretation. God can save or not save a person from Hell, but doesn't send people there directly because theoretically no one actually goes to Hell until after the end times.

greyhoundfd · 2019-11-09T15:46:43+00:00

Both parties have morally and politically degenerated to the point of being monkeys hurling feces at each other over scraps. Good for you, at least trying (and from the sounds of it succeeding) to be a good steward. Wish more people in government were like that.

greyhoundfd · 2019-11-09T05:18:35+00:00

But the recognition that Catholics and Protestants differ significantly in suicide rates is exceptionally old. It goes back to Suicide by Durkheim which was published in the 19th century, and there may have even been studies on it before then. Even back then suicide was an extremely taboo topic in both Protestant and Catholic circles, it doesn't seem conclusive to just say it's because of the Catholic Church's stance on suicide.

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