All the other billionaires are shocked and sickened by his inexplicable attraction to age appropriate women

Let’s be real, they should all be broken the fuck up. Nationalizing corporations is not a still our country knows how to do well… They always pay off the owners and inevitably it ends up back in private hands. We should nationalize the rail network and Amazon, then run them at cost with fair access to power our economy. And starlink… infrastructure in general is really advantageous for so many reasons

But the rest just need to be broken up. It’s by far the best option

Any company that has the money lying around to make a meaningful white house bribe is too damn big. China had a really good idea with their regulatory policy… You just can’t let companies grow to the point their power is on the same scale as the government. They become cancerous

Shutting them down widely would be disastrous for workers and sometimes our general quality of life, nationalizing them would be messy, expensive, and they’d end up sold off for pennies as soon as kleptocrats get back any amount of power… But if we get in the habit of trust busting, we’ll instead be able to course correct whenever someone good is in power

Bonus points if we make the split businesses worker owned and controlled, but I don’t have that much hopium on hand at the moment

Because we literally do have to. It’s entirely up to the Congress members at this point, and they’ve decided this is the best path forward

I’ve done nothing but lay out what seem to be the reasoning and benefits of this choice for progressives, but ultimately no one is running against Jefferies. We don’t have a vote in this, it’s not a very good system, but it’s the one we have right now

I mean, you could write to your congresspeople, but I think getting scheumer out is way more important. There’s benefits to keeping Jefferies, but they do not apply to Schumer… He’s proven willing and able to ratfuck us in a matter of hours

No, it’s still basically a placeholder. Dark matter is basically mass we can’t detect in any way, but the invisible extra mass is required to make our models match up with reality

I think that expansion is more related to dark energy, which is a different placeholder

But we really don’t understand the mechanisms for expansion in the first place… If the universe is twice as old that will certainly change the model. There’s also a growing theory that the universe exists within a black hole, and the spin of that black hole might explain several different strange properties of the universe

The compromise is that Jefferies is a wet noodle. He can be incentivized and coerced into giving progressives a fair shot, for all his whining about “socialism” he’s met with a lot of progressives, and they came out of those meetings convinced he can be worked with

The public overwhelmingly supports progressives, we have a very good chance of building a large coalition in the party this Congress, and building on that moving forward to really get things accomplished. But right the progressive wing is a bunch of junior members and outcasts, it will take time to develop relationships and learn how to pull the levers

The other options are either someone more capable of actually whipping votes, which would not be good for us

Or a card carrying progressive, but we don’t have anyone established enough to whip votes effectively for that. Assuming we could even win a vote. They’d also be in the hot seat - if we don’t get things done, it’ll kill the political momentum… People always blame the president, then the majority leaders

When things move slowly (and I’m sure they will), in two years we can blame our failures on weak leadership and claim our wins for progressives

Jefferies doesn’t have the leadership skills to rat fuck us on his own. He’ll go where the wind blows, he responds to public pressure and has a political career ahead of him to worry about. He’s not an ally but he is a weak enemy

Shumer is different. He has been proven able and willing to rat fuck the party after one phone call, in a matter of hours no less. His political career is also basically over already, he’s going to cash out if we leave him in place

Politics is a bullshit game, a weak enemy is very probably better than a weak ally in this case

In a feat of unparalleled mental athleticism, they’ve managed to avoid learning any correct lesson for a solid decade now

But they’re looking tied out there Jim. Who knows how much longer they can keep up this incredible performance

No one has ever accused him of leadership, but at least he can’t whip votes to backstab everyone

I don’t like or respect Jefferies, but he’s a compromise I could live with

Schumer on the other hand…

I think it’d also be beneficial to do more framing of insurance companies as greedy middlemen, which a lot of working-class people hate here. I don’t understand why there isn’t more hammering on the fact that private insurance takes your money and doesn’t cover fuck all. Like, why does the opposition get to talk about fictional death panels, but we can’t even run ads about insurance companies using AI to jack up prices, deny claims, and make record profits? Please!

Oh yeah, this is a good angle. Pretty much everyone not only hates insurance companies, but we all also have a story of someone in our lives getting screwed over by them

Nah, I don’t have anything like that on hand. I think El-Sayed and Bernie are both good speakers that break it down as well as you really can, but ultimately it’s a bunch of numbers

You might try to find a YouTube breakdown on it, the guy who does the gorilla/banana explanations is really good at dumbing down financial bullshittery,I wonder if he’s made one. I think “how money works” does really clean explanations with infographics, but it’s less dumbed down and more just clearly illustrated… I’m not certain if either of them have such a video, but I’d be a little surprised if they didn’t

You could also look for Bernie’s slide decks, they have to be floating around somewhere and have hard figures

Ultimately, I just don’t think it’s good messaging though. We live in a world of feelings over facts (especially by people who claim the opposite). It’s really easy to ignore these big numbers or to attack the credibility of the presenter

I think it’s more effective to argue two things. First, a society that allows preventable deaths can’t call itself civilized. Second, most wealthy countries spend less, have better health outcomes, and have taxes similar or lower to the US

While it’s true that we would literally save money with any of these solutions (and I think M4A is worse than single payer or nationalizing healthcare, it’s just simpler because the structure is already in place), unconvinced people just will not believe we can essentially do it for free.

We have a cultural skepticism about “a free lunch”, so I think it’s better to first convince people that it’s something we are morally obligated and/or that our healthcare system is uniquely broken and desperately needs some kind of reform

I’ll keep an eye out and try to pass it along if I come across something like you’re looking for, search is just really bad these days or I’d try to grab you something

Wait… Yeah, apparently. My bad

I don’t really read names, usually I just kinda remember their shape? It usually works, even if it makes no sense to anyone else

Oh, I was entirely sincere. Had you been convinced, or at least conditionally convinced, I would’ve responded very differently

Instead you asked for strangely specific proof… And then followed up to explicitly confirm you weren’t sincere

My entire point was your “advice” on how to win people to the cause was bad messaging. Now you’ve revealed you don’t believe in the cause at all

What kind of idiot takes strategic cues from people who want them to fail?

Why would I bother? It’s bad messaging. I don’t believe any amount of sources would satisfy you

But another kind poster provided a link, El-Sayed did so this election cycle, exactly as requested. Sanders has been making these presentations for decades as well, I’m sure you could find those easily if you want to

And I don’t know why you put that qualifier of “this election cycle” on it… These midterms have been a blowout for progressives, doesn’t the fact that they won without making the details of a Medicare for all plan front and center prove my point?

It’s simply bad messaging. It does not win new people over, it only informs the people who already support healthcare reform that it’s even cheaper and simpler than we imagined it would be

I once had to help the company accountant with a tech thing. She had written sticky notes to hit start, find Excel, go to file, go to open file, click payroll, click open file… Etc

She’d been doing that with the same software for 10 years, when I told her she could just click on the the file she freaked out and said I was going to confuse her

It took me a but to realize a detail you might’ve missed… She’d been there for 10 years, and the sticky notes were still sticky. I can’t imagine how many times she rewrote them

That’s what made me understand, some people are genuinely not good with computers. I always thought I was “good with computers” because I was brave enough to explore the menus and Google what I didn’t understand

Some people are genuinely incapable of understanding software, on a very fundamental level

The reason your ER bill was $12k is because of healthcare math

The insurance company will agree to pay, say 40% of the bill. They’ll expect you to pay a smaller percentage, say 10%, and the hospital eats the rest of the cost

So that $12k figure is an amount no one ever pays. If you were self pay, if you simply ask them for an itemized bill you’ll get back something lower. If you even slightly negotiate, you might end up paying like 30% of that lower bill

As for how it all becomes “free”? There’s a lot of people who can’t or won’t pay the $2500 or whatever the hospital needs to cover your care, pay their people, and keep the lights on

So all the unpaid emergency bills go through healthcare math again. The government may pay 60% of the money the hospital gets back, and the hospital is expected to eat the rest. So the bill needs to be inflated so the hospital makes money off this care

It’s all financial bullshittery, but at the end of the day the government pays huge amounts for all the people who use the ER as their primary medical care

If a homeless man has a heart attack, that could be $50-80k the government pays a part of

That same heart attack could likely have been prevented for a few hundred dollars of doctor time/tests, and then a $4 per month prescription

TLDR: it didn’t cost the hospital anywhere near $12k for your visit, and no one is expected to actually pay 12k. Emergency care is still expensive though, and the government basically pays for that

Instead of paying for the uncovered ER care, preventative care is really really cheap.

https://hcup-us.ahrq.gov/reports/statbriefs/sb311-ED-visit-costs-2021.pdf

According to that, in 2021 the federal government paid 80 billion in ED (emergency department) treat and release. That’s only part of the *free" money the government could instead use towards preventative care

I think we need to get to the enlightened level of both sidesism

Both sides are really bad. But there’s not two sides, there’s two terrible parties, and then there’s individuals people. These individual people who are not subservient to capital can make a difference

I think instead of chanting “free health care”, someone needs to sit down and figure out the costs to free health care on an average basis and then look at what the average person pays currently, and see how that compares.If, for example, the Gov says “hey, we’ll tax you ＄500/mo for this healthcare” but its benefits are actually decent, and the average person pays ＄700 anyway, you’d get a lt more people on board with concrete info. If you could choose ＄500 for basic and ＄650 for higher coverage or something, maybe that’s a better way to go.

This is demonstratively not correct… You think no one has crunched the numbers? It’s been done so many times

How about we all pay nothing, and everyone gets full and free access to healthcare?

Turns out, the government would save money. Emergency rooms legally can’t turn away people, and the amount of unpaid emergency care costs more than actually giving everyone healthcare. It’s not even close

This doesn’t really win undecided people over though. They don’t actually care about the numbers… They don’t believe it. Because they don’t trust the people presenting the numbers, and they’re not going to dig through the numbers themselves

Affordable housing means creating laws to ban and block corporations from “investing” in real estate as well as foreign entities. That’d help free up housing, help with ownership vs tenant/renting.

Yeah, that’s part of the plan, along with cutting back the insane amount of zoning and regulation that makes affordable new housing so financially difficult to materialize. It’s not an unknown problem

The questions you’re asking have been answered, over and over. So why don’t you know the answers to these questions already?

It’s because it’s bad messaging. It’s just not an effective method of getting people on board. It doesn’t stick in people’s heads.

You probably are doubting my assertions even now, right? I’d love to be wrong, please tell me if I’ve convinced you though this type of messaging and I’ll reevaluate it’s effectiveness

That’s what I’m saying. Free healthcare, affordable housing, get prices under control. These are the things almost everyone wants

This is where I think praxis gets in the way. You have to meet people where they are, and they’re not ready for a new ideology or to learn a new analytical lens to view the world

People are ready for change though. They’ve had enough of corruption and profiteering of their suffering. They overwhelmingly want what leftists and progressives want, they need to be shown that progressive candidates will actually deliver when elected

That’s pretty cool. It’s a job you can’t ask of anyone, but I always knew it’d be effective

Bigotry is a lot harder to maintain face to face

That would be a very ugly process… It’s not like we’d come out on the other side as a close collection of states like the EU. It would be brutal and extremely chaotic

I think the federal government has been critically damaged over the last 2 years, so I think a lot of power is going to return to the states naturally. I think we have an opportunity to redefine what happens federally starting in January, and I think the answer to that can’t be “nothing”

I don’t want to test the might of individual states against megacorps. And we are going to be up against megacorps either way

Surely if he needs RAM so badly he’d accept donations, right?

Is there anywhere he accepts large files? Because surely there’s some generous souls who would upload RAM to help him out