Same “logic” as saying that “no one is forcing you to eat”.

In reality those who do have an option to not drive are in certain professional occupations (basically office jobs with remote working) and/or live in certain places (such as city centers were housing costs are much higher).

The forcing to drive isn’t done via a clear explicitly written law that sets penalities for people who don’t drive (clearly the only level of extremely painfuly obvious limitation that certain people need to identify it as an imposed choice), it’s done by removing choices from people or artifically making other choices be very negative, for example by giving so much room to cars and such weak penalties for running over cyclists that cycling becomes very dangerous, by outside city centers not having proper pedestrian walkways or by how Land Property laws inflated the price of housing - a life essential - to such level that many people can’t afford to live near work and have to commute to it, which they can’t do with public transportation because no such thing is provided or is laughably inadequate.

The “forcing” isn’t don’t in a “so painfully obvious that even a simpletion gets it” way, it’s done via removing of making unviable choices at multiple levels and isn’t equal for everybody - generally the less well of you are the worse it gets (for example people whose bank of mommy and daddy paid for their higher education so that generally they earn enough to have access to the kind of housing and/or be in a profession were, unlike the others, they do have a real choice not to drive).

(I actually don’t drive, and I’ve chosen not to drive because I can and I do think more people who do have a choice not to drive should do it like I do and walk or cycle to work, or even work from home, but I also hail from a poor working class background and don’t run around with well-off middle class delusions that my somewhat priviledged situation is typical rather than atypical)

If the insurance didn’t create the atmosphere of territorial turfing, prices would be naturally set by competition. They would be much more accessible.

Healthcare suffers from several very competition distorting Economic effects.

• The so called “expert advantage”, which is the situation were the buyer doesn’t have the expertise to judge the quality of the service the seller is offering.
• That buyers are willing to pay just about anything to survive, so unlike pretty much everything else the upper limit to prices is incredibly high (basically, everything a person has plus how much debt they can take in).
• As somebody else pointed out, healthcare service provision is geographically constrained for a lot of things, the more urgent the situation the worse it gets, so for example if you have an accident and your life is in danger, if there is only one Hospital in town that’s were the ambulance will take you, so you literally have no choice.
• The cost and time to train medical professionals as well as of the equipment, means that for anything beyond simple clinics there is a high barrier to entry into that market.

Unlike the ideological pseudo-magical fantasy bullshit that some politicians spew about the Free Market in order to defend certain choices of theirs that benefit those who given them millionaire speech circuit fees and non-executive board memberships (namelly to justify privatising things that are in low competition or even natural monopoly markets), Free Market Theory only works for a few markets where there is a natural tendency for competition such as, say, teddy bears or soap, not for markets were there are multiple factors reducing choice and the ability of buyers to judge the quality of what they are buying before they buy it.

I use a pretty basic one (with an N100 microprocessor and intel integrated graphics) as a TV box + home server combo and its excellent for that.

It’s totally unsuitable for gaming unless we’re talking about stuff running in DOSEmu or similar and even then I’m using it with a wireless remote rather than a keyboard + mouse, which isn’t exactly suitable for PC gaming.

Mind you, there are configurations with dedicated graphics but they’re about 4x the price of the one I got (which cost me about €120) and at that point you’re starting to enter into the same domain as small form factor desktop PCs using things like standard motherboards, which are probably better for PC gaming simply because you can upgrade just about anything in those whilst hardware upgradeability of mini PCs is limited to only some things (like SDD and RAM).

Time to stop the Israeli white colonialist land theft - FTFY.

Trauma my ass.

Literally only a handful of people alive today in Israel experienced the Holocaust and most aren’t even descendents Western European Jews: their parents and grandparents came from Russia (especially people from the Settler Movement).

Nah, this is the same kind of thieving and murdering white colonialism as in the US back when their were genociding the Native Tribes, Appartheid South Africa and the worst of the White occupiers in Africa (such as Belgium in Congo) - as can be seen by the way the Zionists treat Ethiopian Jews - which just happens to be associated with an unusual overwhelmingly white religion other than the usual overwhelmingly White religion.

These people have the same kind of “Western Values” as early XX century Germany.

The real anti-antisemitism is the genociders who are mass murdering children because of their ethnicity claiming that their actions represent all Jews and hence criticizing them is anti-semitic.

Even in their use of “If you criticize what you do you’re criticizing our race” arguments the Zionists are the closest to Nazis there is in the present day.

Spain will side with them.

Also the biggest losers in a tit-for-tat “veto war” would be Germany as the EU is still mainly a Mercantilist organization and they’re the ones who gain the most from it.

In this the Republic Of Ireland is a shinny example of Humanitarianism and shames most of the rest of Europe (I know I’m ashamed of the government of my own country).

Unlike the Republic Of Ireland not that many European countries will be able to say in the Future when people talk about the XXI century version of the Nazis that they were on the right side of History.

Just gotta wait for the imaginary plane.

But people do stop believing money has value, or more specifically, their trust in the value of money can go down - you all over the History in plenty of places that people’s trust in the value of money can break down.

As somebody pointed out, if one person has all the money and nobody else has money, money has no value, so it’s logical to expect that between were we are now and that imaginary extreme point there will be a balance in the distribution of wealth were most people do lose trust in the value of money and the “wealth” anchored on merelly that value stops being deemed wealth.

(That said, the wealthy generally move their wealth into property - as the saying goes “Buy Land: they ain’t making any more of it” - but even that is backed by people’s belief and society’s enforcement of property laws and the mega-wealthy wouldn’t be so if they had to actually protect themselves their “rights” on all that they own: the limits to wealth, when anchored down to concrete physical things that the “owners” have to defend are far far lower that the current limits on wealth based on nation-backed tokens of value and ownership)

And further on point 2, the limit would determined by all that people can produce as well as, on the minus side, the costs of keeping those people alive and producing.

As it so happens, people will produce more under better conditions, so spending the least amount possible keeping those people alive doesn’t yield maximum profit - there is a sweet spot somewhere in the curve were the people’s productivity minus the costs of keeping them productive is at a peak - i.e. profit is maximum - and that’s not at the point were the people producing things are merelly surviving.

Capitalism really is just a way of the elites trying to get society to that sweet spot of that curve - under Capitalism people are more productive than in overtly autocratic systems (or even further, outright slavery) were less is spent on people, they get less education and they have less freedom to (from the point of view of the elites) waste their time doing what they want rather than produce, and because people in a Capitalist society live a bit better, are a bit less unhappy and have something to lose unlike in the outright autocratic systems, they produce more for the elites and there is less risk of rebelions so it all adds up to more profit for the elites.

As you might have noticed by now, optimizing for the sweet spot of “productivity minus costs with the riff-raff” isn’t the same as optimizing for the greatest good for the greatest number (the basic principle of the Left) since most people by a huge margin are the “riff-raff”, not the elites.

“Your qualifications trump my own claims of expertise and your argument ravaged my deeply held little-more-than-political-slogan beliefs and I’m psychologically unable to handle it so I’m going to attack your style of writing, make broad claims about your personality and block you to stop the mental tension that what you wrote causes in my mind”

Most of that time in my career I spent designing and deploying algorithms was in Equity Derivatives and a lot of that work wasn’t even for Market Traded instruments like Options but actually OTCs, which are Marked To Model, so all a bit more advanced than what you think I should be studying.

Also part of my background is Physics and another part is Systems Analysis, so I both understand the Maths that go into making models and the other parts of that process including the human element (such as how the definition of the inputs, outputs and even the selection of a model as “working” or “not working needs to be redone” is what shapes what the model produces).

One could say I’m intimately familiar with how the sausages are made, and we’re not talking about the predictive kind of stuff which is harder to be controlled by humans (because the Market itself serves as reference for a model’s quality and if it fails to predict the market too much it gets thrown out), but the kind of stuff for which there is no Market and everything is based on how the Traders feel the model should behave in certain conditions, which is a lot more like the kind of situation for how Algorithms are made for companies like Healthcare Insurers.

I can understand that if your background is in predictive modelling you would think that models are genuine attempts at modelling reality (hence isolating the makers of the model of the blame for what the model does), but what we’re talking about here is NOT predictive modelling but something else altogether - an automation of the maximizing of certain results whilst minimizing certain risks - and in that kind of situation the model/algorithm is entirely an expression of the will of humans, from the very start because they defined its goals (minimizing payout, including via Courts) and made a very specific choice of elements for it to take in account (for example, using the history of the Health Insurance Company having their decision gets taken to Court and they lose, so that they can minimize it with having to pay too much out), thus shaping its goals and to a great extent how it can reach those goals. Further, once confronted with the results, they approved the model for use.

Technology here isn’t an attempt at reproducing reality so as to predict it (though it does have elements of that in that they’re trying to minimize the risk of having to pay lots of money from losing in Court, hence there will be some statistical “predicting” of the likelihood of people taking them to court and winning, which is probably based on the victim’s characteristics and situation), it’s just an automation of a particularly sociopath human decision process (i.e. a person trying to unfairly and even illegally denying people payment whilst taking in account the possibility of that backfiring) - in this case what the Algorithm does and even to a large extent how it does it is defined by what the decision makers want it to do, as is which ways of doing it are acceptable, thus the decision makers are entirely to blame for what it does.

Or if you want it in plain language: if I was making an AI robot to get people out of my way whilst choosing that it would have no limits to the amount of force it could use and giving it blade arms, any deaths it would cause would be on me - having chosen the goal, the means and the limits as well as accepting the bloody results from testing the robot and deploying it anyway, the blame for actually using such an autonomous device would’ve been mine.

People in this case might not have been killed by blades and the software wasn’t put into a dedicated physical robotic body but it’s still the fault of the people who decide to create and deploy an automated sociopath decider whose limits were defined by them and which they knew would result in deaths, for the consequences of the decisions of that automated agent of theirs.

The individual on one side is indeed powerless (or at least it seemed to, until Luigi showed everybody that things aren’t quite like that).

However on the other side there are individuals too and they are not powerless and have in fact chosen to set up the system to make everybody else powerless in order to take advantage of it, and then deflect the blame to “the rules”, “the law” or “the algorithms”, when those things are really just a 2nd degree expression of the will of said powerful individuals.

(And as somebody who worked in making and using Algorithms in places like Finance, algorithms are very much crafted to encode how humans thing they should work - unless we’re talking about things done by scientists to reproduce natural processes, algorithms - AI or otherwise - are not some kind of technical embodiment of natural laws, rather they’re crafted to produce the results which people want them to produce, via the formulas themselves used in them if not AI or what’s chosen for the training set if AI)

My point is not about the point itself that you made, but the language you used: by going on and on about “the algorithm” you are using the very propaganda of the very people who make all other individuals powerless that deflects blame away from those decision makers. That’s the part I disagree with, not the point you were making.

PS: If your point was however that even the decision makers themselves are powerless because of The Algorithm, then I totally disagree with it (and, as I’ve said, I’ve been part of creating Algorithms in an industry which is a heavy user of things like models, so I’m quite familiar with how those things are made to produce certain results rather than the results being the natural outcome of encoding some kind of natural laws) and think that’s total bullshit.

Oh, it’s way worse than merely the algorithms.

You see, the algorithms are trained or designed according to the choices of people, the ones selected from the various possibilities to be put in place and used being the ones that people chose to put in place and use, and even after their nasty (sometimes deadly) effects for others have been observed they are kept in use by people.

The Algorithm isn’t a force of nature or a entity with its own will, it’s an agent of people, and in a company were the people creating the algorithms are paid for and follow other people’s orders about how it should be, the people with for whom the Algorithm is an agent are the decision makers.

Deflecting the blame with technocratic excuses (such as that it’s the Algorithm) is a very old and often used Neoliberal swindle (really just a Tech variant of rule-makers blaming problems on “the rules” as if there is nothing they can do about it, when they themselves had a saying on the design of those rules and knew exactly what they would lead to)

Whilst that is indeed true for the population in general, politicians are a bunch of people self-selected on being the kind who wants power.

That kind of personality is generally less trustworthy (and more on the sociopath side of the spectrum) than the general population.

There’s actually a study published ages ago in the Harvard Business review about corporate CEOs (so, not politicians but in many ways similar) which found that the ones who got the job not because they sought it but because of other reasons (for example, the CEO died and they were the next in line) actually performed better (as measured by the performance of the companies they led compared to the rest of their industry) than CEOs who had sought that position and, even more interestingly, the most self-celebrating showoff CEOs were the worst performing of all (from my own participation with politics I would say those would be the closest in personality to top politicians).

Further, there are various pretty old sayings (back from the time of the Ancient Greeks and the Romans) about the best person to get a leadership position being the one who doesn’t want a leadership position.

So I would say that most politicians in parties with higher chances of getting power (so, in most countries, the two largest parties) are crooked (not specifically corruption - such as getting money to pass certain laws of using certain companies for government contracts - but more generally using power, privileged information, influence and connections to benefit themselves even to the detriment of those who voted for them: a good example of crookedness but not corruption is how some US Congressmen use insider information they get in some Congressional Committees to profit in stock market trading).

The UK NHI doesn’t work well because the neoliberal parties in successive governments (both the Tories and New Labour) have been defunding it so that they can - like Thatcher did with the railways - once its quality has fallen due to lack of funds claim that it’s bad because of Public management whilst it would be much better if it was Private because the Private Sector is much more competent, and privatise it.

Just like the US has fatcats that are perfectly happy to mass murder people for personal profit, so does the UK (and the British Political System is almost as bad as the American, so it’s definitelly sold to the highest bidder) and plenty of those jhave wet dreams of the country having 13% of its GDP flowing through a Private Healthcare sector like the US were they can make billions of pounds doing exactly the same as the fatcats do in US Healthcare.

Source: I lived in Britain for over a decade.

By the way, you “read that the UK NHI doesn’t work very well” is exactly because the UK media is overwhelmingly owned by tax avoiding billionaires who are part of the above mentioned fatcats who see themselves as profiting massivelly from Britain having a Healthcare System like the US. It’s not by chance that the level of trust of Britons in their Press is one of the lowest in Europe.

The exact same kind of tactics were deployed by Tatcher back when she wanted to privatise the Railways with the result that satisfaction with the Railway system in the UK is now even lower than when there was a public operator even after Thatcher defunded it to claim “Public is Bad, Private is Good” to amass enough public support to privatise it.

From what I’ve seen, treatments not being covered are only the case were those treatments are very expensive and there are other effective treatments (though less effective) which are much cheaper.

There’s also often a delay between a new and very expensive experimental treatment coming out and it becoming covered because it won’t be covered if it doesn’t demonstrate that it’s advantages over the other available treatments are sufficient to justify the additional cost.

Mind you, I’m talking about Public Healthcare Systems, not the so-called Mixed Systems that have mandatory Health Insurance (usually highly regulated and with a Public Insurance option for the less well off) - Mixed Systems have some of the same problems as the US System at least in my experience living in countries with one and with the other kind of system.

I’m talking about Universal Health Care systems (for clarity: totally free healthcare for residents in that country), not Public Health Insurance systems.

Europe is unfortunatelly also riddled with the latter system and having lived in countries with one kind and countries with the other, they’re quite different and the system with Insurance is invariably worse in terms of denials of coverage as well as cost (also because nowadays they all have laws that force every resident to have health insurance, which as result is more costlier than before those laws - as I saw first hand when I lived in a country with such a system when such a law came into effect), whilst UHC tends to have longer waiting lists (think 1 or 2 years of wait for some cirurgical procedures).

Absolutelly, some of the absurdities of the US system are also present in the so-called “Mixed” Systems (i.e. the ones with healtcare insurance but more regulated and with a public option for some) and if you look at the kinds of governments in those countries for the last 3 decades, you’ll notice they’ve been invariably neoliberal mainstream parties (setting up such systems is part of the broader tendency in Europe to privatise just about everything that has been going on since the 80s and was copied from the US).

IMHO, except for the long waiting times, the problems with Healthcare systems in part of Europe are the result of them having been transformed to become more like the US system in the last 3 decades.

Fair enough.