mw1

Wow, I like to actually see the numbers laid out like this. Most of the ultra-wealthy pay almost nothing on their income taxes from investments because they have found ways to avoid capital gains, and even if they were paying long term capital gains rates of 15%, pg’s assertion that the wealth tax adds another 20% doesn’t seem unreasonable at all. If anything, it makes me think 1% is not nearly enough of a wealth tax!

The law says if you murder someone you go to jail. Therefore, it’s following the law to murder someone as long as you take the punishment.

Of course not, the punishment is actually what happens because you disregarded and didn’t follow the law.

The only solution is to provide stable long-term housing and social support. Most else has been tried, but it doesn’t seem that you can punish people and make them less poor. Cops continue to sweep through and steal their belongings, but that clearly won’t solve the problem, and hasn’t. You can throw them all in jail, but that’s more expensive than providing non-jailed housing and rehabilitation services. You can forcefully or enticingly move them along with cops or free bus tickets, but that just shifts the problem elsewhere temporarily. As long as we continue to decide to solve this by increasing funds for cops above all other services in a city, this is the result we will get.

It’s not trivial to concoct a short position in TSLA to offset your index holdings.

For one, it has large borrowing costs. You already admit that short sellers haven’t fared well, and shorting over a long time period can be very costly. Concocting a short position to offset one’s long-term index holdings requires being fairly accurate with timing and is very different than just wishing it wasn’t in there because you imagine that eventually the bill on that will come due, even if it’s years down the line.

If I’m wrong, I’d love to see a cheap way to do it over a 5-10 year period.

Xfinity cable modem / router combos will create public Xfinity networks by default for many years now. Absolutely is something Xfinity could be selling access to for other corporations.

The majority is convinced. Nearly 70% support Medicare for All across multiple polls and that’s with the leadership of both major parties, corporate interests, and news media aligned against.

https://thehill.com/hilltv/what-americas-thinking/494602-pol...

The article I posted makes a case that eliminating private health insurance will be VASTLY more than 5% savings and people can read the article to see why.

You’re choosing to avoid all of the other cost savings that will come from eliminating private health insurance and having a single payer who can effectively negotiate with providers without the goal of taking a slice of profits from an ever bigger pie.

The article I posted did not claim they were the whole problem, nor did I.

They are, however, a large part of the system that no one likes to deal with and can be fully eliminated without obvious negative consequences.

Health insurance doesn’t provide health care and is a purely extractive rent-seeking business. The article I posted even explains how single payer can help drive health care provider rates lower, as you now have a single, powerful entity (Medicare) negotiating against doctors, hospitals and drug companies.

And this “one player” (health insurance companies) heavily lobby against the implementation of single payer health care system. And their profit caps ensure that their goal is to grow the cost of medical care so they can take an ever higher profit in absolute dollars.

One reason you may need to continually plead with people about this is because so many of us have had lived experiences with valid medical claims that should be covered under our policy, denied outright. Not a health insurance company saying “oh, that’s too expensive, go here for less,” but outright denial of coverage. And if we eventually succeed in having these claims covered, it is because we were willing to spend countless hours combing through paperwork, initial delays, and denials.

Also, the same CMS statistics you cite can be combined with other reports to conclude that 500 billion dollars of excess administrative costs PER YEAR are attributable to our lack of a single payer system — something UHC has lobbied heavily against in order to protect their profits over the improved health care of the average American. You can read the numbers here:

https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2024/12/10/health-care-...

“private insurers currently have administrative costs that are 1,000 percent what they would be under single-payer while hospitals currently have administrative costs that are 158 percent what they would be under single-payer. The excess administrative expenses of both the payers and the providers are because of the multi-payer private health insurance system that we have.

When you add it all up, excess administrative expenses — defined as administrative expenses we have under the current system that we would not have under single-payer — are equal to 1.8 percent of GDP, or $528 billion per year.”

Another reason your pleading falls on deaf ears is that, sure, provider payments can be reduced (and this addressed in the above article), but at the end of the day, private insurance is a purely rent-seeking enterprise that provides no value to Americans while these “overpaid providers” are actually delivering the care.

I'm the developer, and this is a work-in-progress demo of a software package that processes and summarizes the statuses, photos, videos and links pulled from Twitter's streaming API. After supplying a list of hashtags, user accounts and keywords for a particular topic, thousands of tweets per minute (in this example) are mined and the most popular and rising content is curated for display. I am looking for feedback if people would find this useful for their own niche topics of interest, made available as a software-as-a-service package, open-sourced on github, or both. It's not perfectly polished yet...

Hypocrisy is not always an empty criticism, but you have picked an example that is. Someone who smokes saying "smoking is bad for you" is not a serious hypocrisy -- it could actually be informed wisdom, and they are just stating a fact. Someone in a position of power or influence who smokes on a regular basis, yet would form laws or prosecute/punish others for doing so, is a much better example of when hypocrisy is not at all an empty criticism.

That's pretty much what participation is OWS is... The realization that we don't have a political system that can deliver and that it's time to take back control.

As one of those younger Obama supporters, I feel betrayed. Look to the Occupy movement to see how many of us are moving on and looking elsewhere for hope.

Amazon makes two claims as to why they kicked wikileaks. The first, is this portion of their TOS: "you represent and warrant that you own or otherwise control all of the rights to the content"

It is clear that many of their customers do not own or otherwise control all of the rights to the content they host on Amazon's servers. For instance, take tarsnap or SmugMug. They both host clients' property on Amazon servers. Now, while those companies may control some of the rights to the information they are storing , it is clear that those companies do not own nor control "all rights" to that content. SmugMug cannot legally license or resell my photos to others, for example.

As for their claim that it puts people in danger, they cite not a single confirmed case where this has happened.