I don’t know that it’s better; just pointing out that it is kind of how the country works right now. Around 10% of their entire population works overseas at any given time. And those higher paid workers like nurses can bring a lot of value to their families back home.

Is it right? Is it a good idea? I can’t speak to that. But the country has developed an entire administration to deal with it:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overseas_Filipinos#:~:text=This%20number%20constitutes%20about%2011,be%20young%20and%20gender%2Dbalanced.

(I work with a lot of Filipino nurses who have explained some of this mentality to me.)

Almost 10% of the entire GDP of the Philippines is the money those overseas workers send home:

https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/Philippines/remittances_percent_GDP/#:~:text=Remittances%20as%20percent%20of%20GDP&text=For%20that%20indicator%2C%20we%20provide,from%202021%20is%209.31%20percent.

You’re not wrong about the fact that we underinvest in training our own population to do this work though.

The irony that phenylephrine intravenous is actually effective at maintaining blood pressure in people who are trying real hard to die on ya. (Our ICU uses it sometimes.)

https://www.lhsc.on.ca/critical-care-trauma-centre/phenylephrine-neosynephrine

Preach. I hate the shit, it makes me feel shaky, but god damn does it work.

Oh noes! If he pays more in taxes he might be just regular old dirty rich instead of obscenely-no-one-could-ever-contrubute-enough-to-the-world-to-justify-this-level-of-wealth-accumulation rich. I feel so sorry for him.

So… Republican standard operating procedure then?

Almost nothing but. It’s a very insular community. Lots of nepotism and government work is seen as a means to enrich yourself and your family

As a person who lived in the Virgin Islands for some time: Zero shock

has been turned

You say as if it weren’t always like that. Because it definitely has always been like that from the dawn of civilization, sadly.

These corporate instruments are quite efficient. Unfortunately you and I just happen to disagree with the rich and powerful about what we should be efficient at doing

What state are you in? Was it one that refused to expand Medicaid? Because here in Massachusetts, which is the model state for the ACA, our Medicaid (Masshealth) is actually the best insurance I’ve ever had in my entire life. The individual mandate HAS to be accompanied by subsidies and expansion of Medicaid or it doesn’t work.

I appreciate that some people are able to afford to forego insurance, but most people can’t in reality. (I can’t. I have a chronic illness. I require daily meds for life.) And when they get sick, their cost still exists in the system and it’s more expensive. It’s not different from being forced to carry car insurance, if you drive.

That said, housing costs are out of control. I advocate at every moment to increase the housing supply. (Currently in polite disagreement with my NIMBY neighbors over a proposed new housing development near us.) Drug costs are out of control and need to be regulated. (I prefer nationalized, actually. But I know that’s a nonstarter in the US).

Ok, well you didn’t say that in any comments to me, so I didn’t see it. But also, let’s not pretend like there aren’t right-wing bad actors out on these platforms pushing that exact “both sides” message to discourage people from voting. Because you and I both know there are. These public comments have consequences

The Republican gutting of the individual mandate and refusal to accept federal funds to expand Medicaid is what crippled the ACA.

We only got to see the actual ACA in action for like two years and it was working. It always comes down to the Republicans actively working to ruin any progress we make.

https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/10.1377/hlthaff.2019.01433

Single payer is the only actually viable option. The more change we make, the more obvious that will become. Probably single payer with private supplementation is where we’ll end up because America will never settle for rich people not being able to buy nicer lives than the rest of us.

Republicans are actively working to make it worse on purpose

What do you propose? Give me something that is viable.

People are going to die. Our stupid populace always refuses to come around and pay attention to an issue until they see bodies in the streets. That’s the real reason we haven’t seen major action on climate change until now. I don’t prefer that reality, but it is sadly the one that we are working with whether we like it or not.

The climate bill isn’t enough, but is that a reason to throw all progress out the door and allow the ones who are actively trying to destroy the world into power?

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-scientists-say-about-the-historic-climate-bill/

The ACA was only ever meant to be a first step. It was never intended to be the end goal. The Republicans gutting the individual mandate is what stole that momentum because it leaves simply being uninsured as an unfortunately viable financial option for enough people that it reduced pressure to reform the rest of the system.

The end goal is single payer. But it’s difficult to the point of bordering on impossible to shift from what we had instantly into single payer in the third most populous country on the planet. It’s estimated that single payer will put nearly 400,000 private insurance middle-people out of jobs. That’s not a negligible problem. We’re going to need a way to address that in the process of making the shift.

The ACA open markets have allowed me to leave jobs that I otherwise would not have been able to leave because I can’t afford to go 30-90 days without health insurance. That open market didn’t even exist when I was a young adult 20 years ago. Insurance gaps between jobs were simply a fact of life that a lot of people couldn’t abide

The ACA, the infrastructure bill, the climate bill, getting sick days for rail workers without crashing the entire country

It’s not perfect, but it is progress

It’s the almost invisible boring little bureaucratic improvements that I actually find most exciting because they signal the real intent of the administration: https://prospect.org/labor/2023-08-07-biden-admin-labor-rule-davis-bacon/

I’ve been voting regularly for 20 years and the ACA was a massive move in the correct direction…until Republicans gutted the individual mandate and refused federal funds for Medicaid expansion. It’s always the Republicans ruining any semblance of progress that we make. I find Dems most guilty of trusting SCOTUS to do their jobs for them.

I want to see Dems again get a solid, undeniable majority in both chambers in 2024. Then push the priority passage of voting rights and anti-gerrymandering legislation. Those are concrete fixes to the system.

Yeah, I sort of feel like something like this would be a horrifying death process followed by an afterlife of “yeah, ok, that was a pretty funny way to go out.”

You can only hope that the end arrives quickly with something like this.

Enjoy: https://youtu.be/OGldNpngDws

Republican obstructionism is worse than Democrat foot-dragging. Sorry, I know people get frustrated with the lack of progress, but one of those things is clearly a bigger problem than the other.

If a third party revolutionary candidate were actually viable and likely to provide even incremental improvement in the lives of real people, then I’d be on board. But it’s not viable. Incremental progress is preferable to no progress or negative progress.

Seriously, it’s such a naive stance to think that just because progress didn’t arrive hand delivered to your doorstep gift-wrapped with a bow on top exactly the way you imagined, then it’s not worth having. What a ridiculous idea. Progress is progress. Every little step brings us closer to the next step. Demanding perfection all at once is going to get us exactly nowhere.

Stop letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.

I’m in my mid-40s and half of that list is in heavy rotation on my Spotify playlists lol. Metric was one of my top most listened to bands last year

I suspect it’s less an age thing than a preference of musical genre thing

This is why my backpack has a patch that reads:
“Evil is boring”

It’s literally the exact same words, the exact same playbook every. single. time. And it’s exhausting.

Evil is not capable of creating anything new. Like you said, if we didn’t have to divert our energy to fighting this nonsense, so much more creation of new, good, interesting things could be accomplished.

You’re probably thinking of the McCain-Feingold Act limiting political media from being used as a loophole to do an end run around campaign finance limitations.

But don’t worry, SCOTUS overturned that and decided that unlimited dark money in campaigns was just fine after a certain organization called Citizens United complained about not being allowed to air their Hillary hit piece:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillary:_The_Movie#:~:text=Hillary%3A%20The%20Movie%20is%20a,non%2Dprofit%20organization%20Citizens%20United.

As a nurse, I have to verify your name and birthdate 27 times a day to make sure I don’t give you any medications that could kill you, but a cop is allowed to just assume. No triple checking verification of an address or person’s identity.

Cool. Totally makes sense 👍

I’m mildly obsessed with HK lol. I only got it in Dec 2022 and I just beat The Radiance for the first time a few weeks ago. I can’t seem to manage it a second time, so I literally just bought the game on Steam and got an Xbox controller because it’s more responsive than my Switch. I’m not sure what happened to my life haha

(Still waiting for someone to get my reference though. Not HK related :)

With that username and you don’t say Hollow Knight right out the gate, I am disappoint 😂

(Seriously though, OP, Hollow Knight is cheap and amazing.)

I’m just here to appreciate your eloquent critique of that painfully boring kitchen.

I’m just here to appreciate your eloquent critique of that painfully boring kitchen.

Let’s face it, this was always their plan from the beginning. Those who have enough wealth to move anywhere in the world they want were never going to be the ones negatively impacted by Brexit, so why should they care? Pass the legislation, get their payday from their sponsors, then flee the country leaving the little guy to suffer the consequences.

It really is though. I’m super excited for you :)

I’m not a gamer.

I beat the original Contra on NES and I’ve barely played anything ever except the first Animal Crossing and AC:NH during the pandemic.

I picked up Hollow Knight for Christmas last year and it’s the first game I’ve played to completion in literally 35 years. I just got [no spoilers] ending with 105% completion like two weeks ago.

I can’t begin to convey how much I love this game. It’s definitely what I’m (still) playing this week.

The Harvard scholar is being accused of deliberately fabricating study results by changing data in a spreadsheet on at least one of the studies.

I think the other commenter mentioned lack of replicability because that’s often one of the first indications that the original research results were fraudulent. Inability to reproduce will cause people to go digging through the original data, which is how this stuff gets found in many cases.