The goal of the healthcare system should be to treat people.

The goal of a good healthcare system is to treat people. The goal of ours is to treat the rich to another yacht. Healthcare providers bill far above cost for profit, knowing that either the insurance or the patient will have no choice but to eat the cost. Insurance providers use high healthcare costs to justify high policy prices and then do unethical shit to avoid paying out.

The hospitals make money. The insurance company makes money. The shareholders and corporate owners make money. The people needing healthcare get screwed.

The system is, unfortunately, working as intended for those who benefit from it being the way it is.

Oh, absolutely.

I would understand paying for online news as an alternative to ads, and only if the news organization does actual reporting free from political or billionaire interference.

Off the top of my head, I can think of exactly one news website that seems to meet that criteria at a surface level.

For everything else, fuck 'em— archive.is :)

I don’t.

IRS sending in letters about 21 years of scam back taxes I apparently owe them

Taxes are supposed to exist as a way to provide upkeep for infrastructure, government services, and social safety nets. Refusing to pay them while also still benefitting from tax-funded infrastructure and services is just being a parasite on society.

I think we all know the answer to this.

Look, we’re not asking for much. Just the tip.

Breathable air? That’s just another commodity to sell to the masses. Like shelter. And water. And food.

If they could sell us sunlight, they would do it without a second thought.

Sure, but knowing ICE took your kid doesn’t really do much to help get them back.

ICE is now an extrajudicial secret police with even less oversight than the actual police. Even if someone knows ICE kidnapped their relative, nobody in the current administration is going to hold them accountable if they decide to lie and say “no we didn’t”. It took months to get back Abrego Garcia, and that was with the public eye on the situation and the entire Democratic Party pressuring them. For every one Abrego Garcia, there are thousands of people who are still unjustly locked up in a concentration camp.

A bit of a cynical take, but it wouldn’t surprise me if ICE started throwing away shoes and phones onto the roadside.

IT SAYS “NOT FOR COMMERCE” RIGHT THERE! WHY DOES IT MATTER WHAT I’M DOING? YOU’RE MAKING ME LATE FOR WORK!

We already have MMU for Memory Management Unit. Maybe Matrix Multiplication Accelerator instead?

What’s next, leaded gas?

Actually, probably. It’s a good way to make people grow up dumber and more irrational, and that’s basically the target demographic of their party.

It baffles me that pundits, researchers, political leaders and such ponder what’s going wrong when they walk to work and see every single human being doomscrolling this trash away, all while the companies hosting it become the richest on Earth.

One of those is not like the others. As long as lobbying and kickbacks are legal or no worse than a slap on the wrist, politicians are more than happy to be paid to not wonder or care why. Heck, some of them probably welcome it—the algorithms helped them get elected.

One instance? There’s at least two. But does that really matter? Reddit had r/TheDonald and r/conservative, and trying to get those people to fuck off and stop proselytizing elsewhere was like trying to play whack-a-mole against an anthill.

Here, you block the tankie instances and move on with your life.

That’s not fair. Starlink is more than just a private enterprise—it’s a Russian intelligence gathering mechanism.

plus these are benches too it looks like

This part is the most surprising. For something meant to go in urban areas, where’s the hostile architecture? No railings between seats? No spikes?

You’re not giving capitalism enough credit. Corporations and businesses are not altruistic. If they can get away with slowly raising prices to increase profit margins, they will.

That’s a hell of a lot easier to actually achieve when you don’t have foreign produce acting as competition and consequently sanity-checking domestic prices. Foreign suppliers implicitly set a ceiling for how much a product can cost since the market would shift to using them if they became the cheaper option.

To make matters worse, tariffs are a very nice excuse for retailers to raise prices across the board using the excuse that “it costs us more to get it, so it has to cost you more to buy it.” If we’re lucky, they’ll raise foreign goods by the exact amount they’re paying more for them and only choose to raise domestic good prices (for profit) by only some fraction of that amount.

Look for used parts or machines recycled as part of a corporate hardware refresh. They won’t be top of the line, but it’s better than paying double the price for something that’s already expensive.

“Mr. President, can you explain the recent market plunge, and whether they were an intended effect of the reciprocal tariff plan?”

“The plunge? Fake news. There is no plunge, the only plunge is our plunge towards making America great again. The Democrats don’t want it, they’re selling off like crazy. Numbers never seen before. The tariffs are working, Canada is scared. Mexico is scared. Europe, China, Antarctica, all of them scared. They’re nothing” without us and they know it. But the Democrats, the Democrats. Corrupt Democrats are trying to undermine the greatest tariffs plan America has ever seen. They’re lying about the economy, tricking the banks to sell. But that’s fine, it’s fine. It’s their loss, they want to lose. The real winners, Elon, Pete, and other real hardworking Americas know this. They buy.