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Cake day: December 6th, 2024

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  • Not at all - re-read the last one.

    Not having to pay for Healthcare Insurance means it’s significantly cheaper for a person to do personal life projects that take months or years with little or no income, like getting further education or starting your own company, because your savings (or income from part time work) mainly have to cover housing and food, not Healthcare Insurance (which is almost as costly as housing, more so for people with pre-existing conditions)

    It’s easier to change your career and even your life in general when you don’t have that extra cost of Health Insurance (and hence have a longer “runway” for your new situation to take off and become self-sustainable, as your money will stretch more).


  • As somebody who has by now lived in 2 countries with Universal Healthcare I can answer that:

    • It’s for people who want faster access to non-emergency medical treatment than the public system will provide.

    So if you want to not to have to wait months for specialist appointments and surgery and you can afford it, you get Healthcare Insurance. This even more so for aesthetic and run of the mill dental treatment - the Public isn’t going to, for example, just put you in front of the queue to give you an implant unless it’s deemed necessary because of your health, so if your concern is about your appearance you’ll have to wait years or it won’t even be covered.

    Mind you, the whole thing is still backed by the Public Healthcare System: if during a surgery at a private hospital you have massive complications they’ll generally transfer you to a Public Hospital.

    Further, even in the Private everything is way cheaper because of the massive competition from the Public System, plus the Public even uses its leverage to keep the prices of more common medicine low (basically since most of the prescriptions are done by doctors in the Public System, for things were there are multiple options the most expensive stuff doesn’t get prescribed unless it offers enough benefit versus the cheaper options to justify it, so for example things like Insulin are way cheaper if you get it without a prescription from a Public System doctor and free or near free if you do because the State pays most or all of the price)

    Anyways, the single biggest benefit of Universal Healthcare which the “free market is the best” (in this case it isn’t: in general the free market optimizes for profit, not for outcomes, and further, in this domain people will pay whatever it takes to survive and don’t actually have the expertise to judge the quality of treatment and know the availability of other options, so there is no natural free market here) crowd forgets is the peace of mind and freedom Universal Healthcare gives:

    • if you lose your job, you’re still fine even if you have and accident or get sick
    • if you want to change jobs you have total freedom as you won’t be without Healthcare for you and your family in the period between jobs
    • if you need or want to stop working on a regular jobs (because you want to start your own company or want to take a sabatical or want to go back to school and get a degree) you can without losing your Healthcare coverage during that period and it’s going to be way cheaper than if you had to pay Health Insurance (and copays) during that time.

    Private Healthcare Systems are very much prisons that keep people tied to traditional jobs,


  • 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.







  • 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.


  • Zionism is as much “Jews” as Nazism was blue-eyed blonde people: they’re both very similar ethno-Fascist extremely-racist ideologies which glue themselves to an ethnic group claiming to represent them even while plenty of members of that ethnic group very overtly say “They do not represent me”.

    Never believe Fascists when they claim to represent a nation (in the case of the traditional Fascists) or a race (in the case of the ethno-Fascists). In fact, the more general rules is “Never believe Fascists”.





  • 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).



  • Well, I haven’t really made any large wire transfers to accounts outside the EU from that bank in over a decade so can’t really confirm or deny.

    I do know that in past experience with banks in general, the people checking the validity of suspicious transations (and large transfers to accounts outside the EU tend to fall into that classification given the prevalence of online scams from countries were the Law is a bit of a joke) will actually call you, or at least they did in the UK some years ago (pre-Brexit) which was the last time I had experience with something like that.

    (At one point I also worked in a company that made Fraud Detection software).

    Maybe they switched to SMS to save money, I don’t know.


  • Ah, I see.

    Your point is that the use of a secondary channel for a One Time Pass is still an insecure method versus the use of a time-based one time password (for example as generated in a mobile phone app or, even more secure, a dedicated device). Well, I did point out all the way back in my first post that SMS over GSM is insecure and SMS over GSM seems to be the secondary channel that all banks out there chose for their 2FA implementation.

    So yeah, I agree with that.

    Still, as I pointed out, challenge-response with smartchip signature is even safer (way harder to derive the key and the process can actually require the user to input elements that get added to the input challenge, such as the amount being paid on a transfer, so that the smartchip signs the whole thing and it all gets validated on the other side, which you can’t do with TOTP). Also as I said, from my experience with my bank in The Netherlands, a bank using that system doesn’t require 2FA, so clearly there is a bit more to the Revised Payment Systems Directive than a blanked requirement for dynamic linking.