Asklemmy

As much as I hate SEO companies, people who hire them are even worse, so I can only approve of this.

Client :3?

Yep, that's why Marx is correct. Capitalism consolidates itself into large monopolist syndicates, removing the usefulness of Capitalists and eliminating competition, whereby Central Planning of public property becomes greatly more efficient.

The essential conditions for the existence and for the sway of the bourgeois class is the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is wage-labour. Wage-labour rests exclusively on competition between the labourers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the labourers, due to competition, by the revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.

-Karl Marx, Manifesto of the Communist Party

For more reading, Why Public Property? is a good article elaborating in modern lingo.

Capitalists also say "You'll own nothing and be happy", the part they leave out is that it's because you will rent every from them. In filthy socialism, the state holds everything in trust for the people and nobody makes any profits from ownership (the true power of capital).

Considering humans did sell humans.

Anytime I'm in Texas I get the same feeling.

all the mercenary healthcare strikes me as creepy capitalism.

I mean, it kind of makes some sense. Part of what they're doing is checking your location, speed, bearing, etc., and--IIRC--using cell signals for some of that. That's bandwidth, and someone has to pay for it, even if it's not very much. OTOH, Helite makes a vest that uses a tether, and that's going to work well enough in most cases.

I think that there might be some that have options to pay for it all up-front instead of having a subscription, but I'm not positive; I just rely on leather and Knox inserts.

Donziger’s story is heartbreaking and infuriating, and I’m continually disappointed that so few people are familiar with his story and what the courts did to him. It’s one of the clearest examples of judicial corruption and the power and benefits that are afforded to corporations and almost never extended to the people fighting for what’s right and just.

In June 2022, a federal appeals court affirmed Donziger's criminal contempt conviction. In March 2023, the Supreme Court declined to hear further appeals.

I'm shocked.

Well yes, but also no. Meta fired those folks because they were using their lunch stipend provided by meta for things other than lunch. Petty, given how much they were paying the employees, but almost certainly a breach of contract on the employee's part.

Meta is probably trying to do layoffs without paying layoff costs or taking the stock hit layoffs can cause. Which is still capitalist AF by any measure, lol. For fans of watching what kind of shit the oligarchy is trying now, Meta is definitely one to keep an eye on. Mark Zuckerberg has been moving very conservative very quickly lately.

EVERY instance of 'public-private' healthcare goes that route, touted as the wave of the future and a seamless melding of public interest and delicious capitalist pork, and then every single one of them gets drunk on the cash and goes toxic like this.

It's happening to Canada too. And France. And London.

Damn, I didn't know America was contagious...

I'm in the middle of trying to get a fairly expensive surgery.

If I had insurance, I would need to pay about $15,000 (between premiums, copays, annual deductible, coinsurance, and out of pocket maximums) with the only insurance available to me through my workplace before anything would be covered. So it's not really worthwhile, right? Well, the surgery I need--around here--gets quotes of as much as $89,000. The most recent quote that I have is around $18,000. Keep in mind that the surgery takes about an hour, is a surgeon, one OR nurse assisting, and an anesthesiologist. The fee for the surgeon and nurse is about $5000, and the facility takes about $10,000. In the case of surgery in a hospital--rather than an ambulatory surgical center (ACS0---it's even worse. With the same surgeon and OR nurse at an ACS, I had a quote of $16,300; at a hospital the quote was $49,000. The surgeon and nurse get the same fee regardless, which means that the hospital charged >$30,000.

...And good fucking luck getting a lot of places to give you prices at all, even though DHHS has mandated pricing transparency. Even if you know exactly what CPT billing codes are going to be used, it can be days of back and forth before you can get a price. If you need shit fixed NOW, you're just going to be stuck with whatever they charge.

☝️ recently got a covid test that based on all my research beforehand, it should have been covered except for $10 I would pay.

Jokes on me, it actually cost me $200 they charged to my credit card two weeks later. I didn't even get to know the price at the time I needed medical care.

Sometimes other countries make fun of America for things they don't understand. Not on this one, America deserves every bit of mocking it gets for it's medical coverage atrocity.

these are straight out of Repo, the Genetic Opera

Sounds like 'pay day loans' in the US.

Back in the day, a loan shark was a criminal who charged an outrageous 20% interest for money. Working class folks were at the mercy of these "six-for-fivers."

Ronald Reagan became President and now established banks could charge 35% or more.

The users down here trying to teach you what it means while you know it better than them lmao.

“Vote with your wallet” doesn’t mean “if you don’t like it don’t buy it” but if that you don’t like the new iteration of the product reason you shouldn’t buy it, thus letting the company know it wasn’t good enough and they should do better. This premise is flawed because it sounds like some democratic shit, but the only ones who can vote with their wallet are the whales that actually have % on that sweet company revenue: for the average user there is no vote because to matter it would have to scale with other consumers. Something so far unachievable because for a tiny, “loud” minority there is the clueless majority.