Agreed, it seems that health care should be a basic service. And I actually had hopes that President Trump might see it this way as well, he came out strong for example about negotiating with big pharma. But then today he met with them and has decided that regulation and taxes are more of an issue for them than the fact that many of the big pharma companies spend more on marketing in the US than they do on R&D. Ever wonder how much it costs to run all the TV ads, and pay those well paid sales reps who go doctor to doctor taking samples around and lobbying for them to carry their products? How much do the “vacation” seminars cost when they bring doctors to fun places in order to sell them on their products? I had a respected doctor in my family, who was head of a department and an industry specialty group. He never paid for a vacation, if anything he couldn’t go on all the trips he was offered by companies to nice places where they had a one hour seminar on their product and rest of the week was reserved to wining and dining them. I have no problem with non-necessity product companies doing this, if Apple wants to spend half their revenue on marketing, more power to them, first they have competition, and second their products are life or death for anyone event though many might think they are.
And I’m sure the capitalist would say that without a profit motive there would be not research into new treatments. And this may be true, but my point is we could directly pay for the R&D, and the output of that R&D as the treatments that are discovered, and still save a huge amount over what we pay now. One of the basic things that I think most people don’t understand is that for the most part scientist (and I’d venture even many people in the software industry) don’t do what they do just for the money. I love what I do, and while I’m extremely fortunate and happy that I get paid very well to do it, I’m pretty sure I’d still do it even if the compensation wasn’t as good, especially over sitting on my ass or doing a factory job. This is the disconnect between capitalist bean counters and scientists, the bean counters think money is the only motivation there is, because that is their primary motivation for everything. They can’t believe that some people do what they do because they like what they do, and as long as they are compensated well enough to live they will continue to do it. I know a lot of research scientists, and very few are highly money motivated, they are smart enough to know you don’t get rich as a researcher. Give them enough grant money to chase their passion and you typically have to make sure they don’t spend it all on the research and forget to buy food and pay their rent.
Agreed, sorry I over generalized, my intent was convey we seem to have a pretty big population that have had some issues with health, in some cases due to “living hard and fast”, and others of course at no fault of them or anyone else. In the end I do think we need to recognize when people do have a choice and they choose one that may be detrimental to their health, in turn to the cost of it. But we can penalize those who the odds were against and they just flat came up short in the health area. I’ve been lucky to have good health so far, but I also recognize that it’s very possible for that to change at any time. It’s a bit of a reverse lottery, one you don’t want to win where you end up with health issues, which is why I think at least to me it’s reasonable in my mind that I pay a lot more out right now than I consume, and there is a good chance that I’ll never need it, but if I do it’s nice to know it might be there. But this is the same with any insurance. And while I don’t mind providing a bit of profit on my car insurance, or home insurance, I really don’t appreciate providing a nice profit margin on health insurance. For me I could if I chose to live without owning a house, or a car, but I don’t think I’d like to consider health care in the same way.
It turns out that the existing healthcare system does just that already. We can recognize the difference between damaging lifestyle choices and freak health events as communities and come to one anothers’ aid that way, but forcing an entire nation to pay for frankly unhealthy choices is unethical.
A mix of what I’d considered conservative and liberal views into a hybrid form. First you say government is too big, and inefficient, so they shouldn’t the in providing health care, a pretty conservative view. But then you say that it’s better if those can give “according to their ability to meet your need” which sounds a lot more like a liberal view of progressive taxation, those who can afford more should help out more. Except here it’s those who can donate more can do so.
So tell me what your considerations are that you feel universal health care is unworkable? I’ve been in the US my whole life, so really never was in a true universal system, except when I was in the military, there we had a pretty efficient health system that I participated in, fully run by the military, and I can’t complain one bit about the care I received. So based on that little bit of experience, and I’ll admit it’s been a few years since I experienced it, I’d say that if they could model after that we’d have a pretty good standard of care.
And I don’t disagree, people should be accountable for their choices, if it can be clearly shown to be causal. But in many cases unfortunately it’s pretty hard to determine if a condition is definitely from something someone has done, or just bad luck. Sure, if you are overweight you will probably have a higher chance of some forms of illness, but how do you determine if that was the root issue, or if it was just genetics, or luck? Do you say, “your chance of heart disease was 3x due to smoking, so we’ll only pay the 1/3 of a non-smoker”? Tough problem to solve in the end. I think the only way to really handle it is to incent people to not live unhealthy, tax rebate possibly if they do take care of themselves, i.e. gym memberships are tax deductible (if you actually use them…). My company provides us money for fitness, turns out that if it gets people to live healthier we save it on the back end on medical care costs. Last year I bought a rowing machine, company paid for it, I use it quite a bit, have rowed almost 1 million meters now in just under a year. And I can say without a doubt I’m definitely in better health than I was last year at this time. My annual physical (yes, we also pay for preventive care, so we can catch any issues early) was to the point my Dr. asked me what I had been doing he saw such a difference in last year. So it’s possible to get people, maybe not everyone, but a significant number to live a more healthy life. If nothing else as a capitalistic society we just need to put the incentives in the right place. Maybe we do the same for unwanted pregnancy, if a teen makes it to the age of 18 without getting pregnant, we give them a stipend of $10,000. Just a thought, but in my experience carrots are almost always better than sticks in changing unwanted behavior.
Here’s a great example of free market economics at work in the healthcare industry from Reason.comhttp://reason.com/blog/2017/01/27/what-happens-when-doctors-only-take-cash
When government and insurance get in the way it distorts cost and quality. The place for insurance is for catastrophic situations. In the event someone needed hundreds of thousands of dollars of care coming up with $5-$10k would be managable with payments. This could be offset with tax free HSA’s. Save a little each month and then let the health industry compete for those dollars. I say this with experience as I write revenue cycle software for a major insurer. The ACA seemed like a great idea for my company because we would have forced customers. They were all for it until the economics failed and we decided to pull out after losing $500 million one year and forecast to lose even more the next. The free market works, universal healthcare does not. What about Canada you say? Read this https://www.city-journal.org/html/ugly-truth-about-canadian-health-care-13032.html
That was definitely a huge problem. Both candidates were intensely disliked by a large number of voters. None of this, however, justifies betraying the fundamental principles America was founded on.
I would have preferred a ham sandwich over Trump. Trump is the worst president we’ve elected in the last 200 years. He’s dangerous. There’s a reason 50 retired military officers signed a letter saying that Trump was unfit for office.
Put party aside for a moment, and unlike Trump, think about what values actually make America great.
I’m not so sure about that. Clinton, as a candidate, had huge weaknesses and a lot of baggage, for sure – but we didn’t get to see Bernie’s weaknesses play out later as we did with Clinton. Calling it a sure thing is quite a stretch here. Hell, the polls said Clinton was a sure thing. But she wasn’t.
Yeah, the billionaire businessman is definitely gonna crack down on big businesses, right? This makes zero sense. Other points:
NAFTA is probably more of the same “we’re gonna bring back those old manufacturing jobs” narrative, which doesn’t seem likely at all to me. The robots and self driving trucks are coming, we need to adapt to that reality, not wall ourselves off in tariffs and trade restrictions to pretend the future doesn’t exist.
oil / gas is irrelevant, focus on incentivizing solar and other renewables. I don’t see any point in ripping apart our nature reserves when gas won’t even matter in 50 years… but our national parks and lands have to last forever.
term limits on Congress, would love to see this, but I think it has a 0% chance because the people voting for it will not benefit
five-year ban on lobbyists, I am fine with this but Citizens United is the real problem, not this.
I could go on… I’d say 80% of the stuff Trump has planned is either ridiculously shortsighted or outright harmful. The guy also has a very bad temperament for a leader and sets off so many red flags for me. Like I said, I vote on leadership most of all, and Trump is an awful leader. Capricious, vindictive, cruel, cronyism, nepotism, won’t ever admit he made a mistake, etc. I can go on. I mean just look at his portrait. Every other president in recent memory looks happy and proud, but Trump is angrily scowling.
I actually want politicians that try to reach a common consensus on decisions, rather than ramrodding through extreme plans with little forethought or discussion. Yes, this may result in slower progress overall, but that’s why the political system was designed by the framers with checks and balances to begin with. You’ll reach decisions that are acceptable to “most”.
That said I wasn’t exactly a fan of Clinton. She was a politician’s politician. But again: I’d literally vote for a ham sandwich before I voted for Trump because I consider him not just unpalatable but dangerous to American democracy.
Not according to Ruben Andersson, an anthropologist at the London School of Economics and Political Science and the author of a book titled “Illegality, Inc.: Clandestine migration and the business of bordering Europe.”
For one thing, Andersson said, walls tend to be built for domestic political reasons by governments that want to be seen to be doing something about migration. For another, it seems that where there’s a wall, there’s a way. In other words, people who want to cross a border badly enough will find creative ways to circumvent a wall – even if it means taking greater risks by crossing elsewhere.
“These fences are not solving anything,” Andersson said. “Numbers are not going down. People will find a way.”
You might as well take all that $25 billion and burn it. I say we should use that wall money to build bridges, roads, and other essential infrastructure that benefits Americans.
I agree with you 100% here @giorgiog and I will go this far – if Trump manages to make Medicare extend unconditionally to every person in America, as universal simple healthcare, I will go on record saying that I’ll vote for his re-election. And I promise I will, too. That is so important that I’m willing to overlook everything else.
Seriously? Do you have children, Nathan? I apologize for asking, but please answer me: do you have children?
The current plan we’re using, with minor tweaks to continue doing the things that are effective, and dropping the things that are less effective. Our immigration policies are already working quite well, and growing goverment to add more bureaucracy isn’t a good idea.
Incorrect. It was written to provide a list of actions any American can take to make sure their voices are heard. Just refer to the bottom 1/3 of the post with the bullet points, and read them.
This is also incorrect, and the assumption here is quite telling. I’ll leave understanding that up to the reader.
We have some serious problems in America, and #1 among those is the huge (and growing) disparity between the rich and poor.
I don’t think pointing out that a remembrance day holocaust statement from the white house that doesn’t mention Jews is in incredibly poor taste, particularly when the statements from previous administrations – one republican, one democrat – absolutely did. “All Lives Matter” is some bullshit.
This is not hard to understand. Vulnerable groups – houses on fire – need more help than I do as a rich white man.
I’d make the same argument anti-gun control proponents like to make – absolutely nothing about a US-mexico wall is going to stop any of that. It’ll just make America $25 billion poorer, with exactly the same number of illegal immigrants. Let’s spend that on infrastructure projects that matter, not performance art.
The point is that they explicitly left those countries. Likely to seek a better future, more rights and opportunities for their daughters and sons. We have freedom of religion in this country, and always have. Get used to it.
Well, if we can provide citations, links to reasonable sources, perhaps everyone can learn a bit about the issues and have a more nuanced position on their issues. That’s the goal, for me anyway…
Also thanks everyone for keeping it (mostly, cough David) civil here.
Fair enough, nothing is a sure thing until it plays itself out. Having said that, had it been Bernie vs Trump on the ticket, I would have voted for Bernie. That’s only a sample size of one obviously.
No offense, but how many democrats have cracked down on big business? Republicans? Sometimes trying something (or someone) different feels better than doing the same old shit expecting the different results. It may not wind up being better, but I felt no confidence things would get any better with Hillary. Neither candidate was likable, and from my point of view she had more political baggage than he did (for the obvious reason that he had never held office before.)
Citizens United is a large part of a huge systematic problem. Pay for play is alive and well and as long as the media keeps calling it lobbying, no one will be pressured into changing any of it.
You never actually answered his question about having children. But let’s presume you do at least have living parents. Assuming you graduated from college in 2012 that puts you around 25-26, and your parents are not yet likely old enough to be on Medicare, or to have serious health issues (of course I could be wrong, but based on your lack of sympathy and unrealistic ideas like fundraising for health, I assume your parents are in relatively good health.) Fast forward 10-20 years, your parents are retired and need long term care or a lengthy (3+ month) hospital stay - say goodbye to their life savings and say hello to a mountain of debt. My wife was a social worker at a nursing home - the cost for one month’s stay at that facility was between $6,000-8,000.
Are you going to take care of your father/mother if they develop Alzheimer’s Disease when their savings run out? Full-time? No of course, you can’t. How will you cope? You know who you’ll turn to? it’s not your little community, it’s that big organization you’ve been railing against throughout this thread.
Yep, he’s an asshole, one I wouldn’t want to be an adversary of. But if your interests and his align, I think you’d be quite happy that he were on your side. That was his pitch to the middle class. Enough people bit and here we are.
I’ll hold you to that promise…somehow…from across the other side of the nation.
I’m agreeing with you with a caveat… “Likely to seek a better future.” But you can’t be certain, so there is opportunity for fear and doubt. Would there be less violence in 2015/2016 in Europe had they not let waves of immigrants from Syria in? Who knows, but many people fear the worst and say we don’t want your refugees. As far as I’m concerned, it’s unlikely to affect me directly given my lack of proximity to likely targets (big cities.)
However, someone who would tell another human being that they should be forced to crowdsource medical funding for their sick child on Gofundme is deeply lacking in basic human empathy.
Remember Bannon explicitly said he wants to destroy everything. It is deeply cynical to walk in, break government, then say “see, I told you the system was broken.” Reform and improvement is needed, as it is at all times in American history, but that kind of nihilism isn’t accomplishing anything – and it can be harmful, as a lot of people depend on government for basic services.
I don’t believe the President has the power to break everything (short of deploying nuclear weapons.) GW Bush had arguably smarter and at least equally sinister group of people surrounding him (Cheney and Rove come to mind.) He managed not to break everything. You may not have agreed with all of his policies, but we survived, made it through another president, survived…and I suspect the same outcome will occur in 4/8 years.
Compare Bush’s first week in office with Trump’s first week. Radically different. And not in a good way. Lots of things are being broken.
I’m standing by my original production: when this is done, Trump will be considered among the three worst presidents in American history. If not the worst.
For me the jury’s still out. My impression is that many people just hate him and no matter what, they believe he’s going to ruin this nation because…feelings.
I think you are being deliberately obtuse; point me to a single executive order as disruptive as Trump’s Muslim ban that any president has instituted in the first month of their presidency. And that was in the first week!
Who has been disruptive? The protesters? they were nowhere to be found when Obama expanded the drone strike program which actually KILLED people in some of those countries in Trump’s EO:
According to the data, U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and Libya killed between 64 and 116 civilians during the two terms of the Obama administration — a fraction of even the most conservative estimates on drone-related killings catalogued by reporters and researchers over the same period. The government tally also reported 2,372 to 2,581 combatants killed in U.S. airstrikes from January 20, 2009, to December 31, 2015.
I’m having trouble figuring out how you can reconcile (ignore?) Obama’s actions versus Trump’s. You may not agree with his agenda/platform/party/etc, but you don’t actually know if it will turn out badly. So stop crying wolf.
Are you experiencing a case of nostalgia for “better” times under Bush or Obama? If memory serves me right, lots of people disliked Bush too.
You and Andersson both claim that walls don’t work. Common sense and the CNN piece you quoted say that’s not true. Leaving aside the “land-grab” aspect of the Israeli wall, there is do doubt that it has been wildly effective. And it’s only barbed wire!
I watched that video. Didn’t learn anything new unfortunately. I’m well aware of wealth disparity in America. It’s a serious problem. A society needs a large middle class to be healthy. The Brazils of the world, with an enormous underclass and a rich elite, are so far gone that reforming their societies is probably intractable without an incredibly visionary leader and several generations of brilliant policies. I humbly submit that shipping jobs overseas and replacing middle class workers with illegal immigrant labour hurts the middle class and worsens wealth inequality. This is a huge topic, but I would like to propose a solution for a CEO earning 380 times the average worker. Especially since the takeovers of the 80s, it’s been made incredibly hard for people like Carl Icahn to take over companies and sack CEOs that are overpaying themselves. That needs to change. Steve Jobs, for example, deserved every cent he earned. He was probably underpaid. But the quality of the average American CEO of a publicly listed company is pretty terrible. No way are they worth 380 times the average worker. They need to be held accountable.
I just think you’re making something out of nothing here. Holocaust remembrance is incredibly important, but again, I was very surprised that the all statements are so short, and that they basically don’t go into any detail about groups and numbers, to make it more real, and impress how horrific it was for the Jews especially and everyone else who died. I can’t see how you’re reading hidden meanings and references to Black Lives Matter and All Lives Matter into this. It seems a little… disjointed.
Again, you say walls don’t work. The Israeli wall, the Great Wall of China, and Hadrian’s wall prove that they do. Perhaps you think that Netanyahu, Qin Shi Huang, and Hadrian just wanted to look busy?
Of course they want a better future. Of course they want more opportunities for their families. Of course they want to come to America. But they will bring with them beliefs and values that are completely at odds with your own (especially your own) and the vast majority of American citizens. They will bring with them the beliefs and values of the cultures they came from. If the bulk of the citizens of the 10 countries, all Muslim, that kill homosexuals like Joel don’t have a problem with that law, what on Earth makes you think that the only ones who want to come to America will be the ones who disagree with it? Consider that the more of those sorts of people you let in, the less they have to integrate, as they can stay in their own communities. Yes, America has always had freedom of religion, more or less. But it has never had large numbers of Muslims with incredibly (relative to your values) regressive social attitudes either. Your argument would be valid if all the Muslims who end up in America and other Western countries magically shake off their regressive values and ideas and integrate. But that’s not going to happen. Obviously.
About 25 years ago was the infamous “Black Sunday”. All of a sudden a right-wing party (Vlaams Blok, later called Vlaams Belang) made a big gain. They would achieve further gains the next few elections. It wasn’t like people all of a sudden became racist. But rather a growing group of people felt like the other parties blatantly ignored their concerns. By now, a less extreme right-wing party, N-VA, scooped up most of those “against” votes.
Maybe our proportional system, and the resulting larger amount of big parties makes our voting system a bit more resilient to extremism, but evidently it doesn’t prevent this kind of surprising election outcomes.
Nice article, so it seems we need to get insurance companies out of the way of pricing. Agreed, so now if we do that how do patients get the money to pay for their health care? If you work for an insurance company then you understand the basics of insurance, you are paying for the ability to get more if you really need it, but that means that many other people need to pay in more than they will ever get back. It’s the nature of insurance, and a way to pool risk across a group. I don’t see how if you went to cash you’d have a populace able to pay for their health care. Not saying we shouldn’t be able to, but I just don’t see it happening.
As for the article on the Canadian system, it sound like they’ve as well as many other countries are having some challenges. Many of them seem to be around lack of staff, especially doctors. That is one thing I can say when I was in the military, the hospitals I went to weren’t under staffed, and I never had to wait long for treatment. I could call in the morning and get in to see the flight surgeon’s office that afternoon in about 95% of the cases. The next day if it was too late in the day and not critical. So maybe the difference is getting more people into medical care? It seems we have a limited number of medical schools, all at capacity and a growing population needing more care then ever. Maybe we need to open more schools, and help qualified students get the money to go to medical school? If you want to go with standard supply and demand economics, it seems we have a supply problem. So let’s start to fix that, while we look at some of the other issues. Maybe the government needs to bootstrap a few new medical schools, maybe a lot of medical schools?
One thing to consider, a wall across the southern border of the US is an entirely different beast than the little border fence that Israel has. Fences don’t scale well, make them long enough and it’s extremely hard to maintain and ensure that they aren’t having holes put in them, or being climbed over every day. Sure you can make sure that doesn’t happen, but that isn’t free either, so how much do you spend on protecting the border. At some point you’d be better off handing out checks at the border to send prospective illegals home to Mexico a little richer, it would cost less (I’m being sarcastic here, but at times I wonder how much we could have paid every person in the Middle East with the Trillions we’ve spent there now protecting our right to cheap oil, which is essentially what the middle east is, our place to ensure oil, nothing more, nothing less. If there were no oil there, it wouldn’t be in the “interests of America”)
Again, I completely agree, but are we not engineers and technologists? Is computer hardware not cheap these days? Do we not have drones, sensors, and software? Well-designed walls, like a well-designed software security measures, are effectively impenetrable and easily maintainable. Although America’s wall would be bigger than Israel’s, the American economy is also bigger. The relative cost to American taxpayer would be far lower than the relative cost to Israel. If Mexico doesn’t pay for it, that is.
Look, the people who don’t want the wall aren’t opposed to it on economic grounds. They’re opposed to it on principle. They don’t want it under any circumstances. If it were free, they wouldn’t want it. If Mexico paid America $30 billion dollars to build it, they still wouldn’t want it. They just don’t want it, on principle, under any circumstances, ever. There’s no getting around that.
This isn’t relevant. Did Obama order special drone strikes within a week of his inauguration? And you think Trump is gonna turn off drone strikes, which are a normal function of our “protect American interests abroad” agencies at this point? Really? Can you explain to me how any of that will improve under Trump? Because I’m quite sure Trump is perfectly willing to shoot his “bad dudes” with drones, even if there is some collateral damage.
I ask again. Please point me to another president that has made an executive order resulting in controversy enough to cause mass nationwide protests, and internal governmental turmoil such as the firing of the attorney general – something last seen under Nixon – in the first week after inauguration. Heck I’ll open it up to the first month.
That’s a different issue. But if you’re concerned about drugs in America, secure borders can only help. Some nations don’t have any trouble enforcing their drug laws, because they put an incredibly high priority on enforcing the law of the land. Like Singapore. Obviously it’s physically smaller and easier to control the flow. But like you said, where there’s a will, there’s a way.
Where were these folks protesting? Oh liberal democrat country - NYC, SF, DC, and so on. These aren’t country-wide protests, they’re sore loser protests.
The first fatal Obama strike killed between seven and fifteen people, reported initially as ‘foreign militants’. In a later report personally given to Obama by his then-CIA chief General Hayden, the Agency admitted missing its high value target and killing ‘five al Qaeda militants’, but made no mention of civilian deaths (Bob Woodward). However Newsweek reported in May 2012 that the President was made aware that civilians had died almost immediately.
I know, and that’s how I’d always do it. But the idea with an army of little helpers was actually an honest one. You can only keep up with research to a certain point, if you want to actively debate with everyone answering. Then there simply isn’t enough hours left in the day.
Eh, choose another example. Venezuela’s main problem is price fixing, not socialism.
There are many ways to organise health care, and there are nuances too: obviously no system can pay for everything for everyone. But expecting the ‘community’ to pay for chronic conditions in the most individualistic country on earth is a bit of a stretch.
Interesting article on healthcare here:
I’m pretty sure that if this drone strike could be signed off so early in his presidency it’s because he inherited it from Obama. That aside, could people please decide whether US interventionism abroad is a good or a bad thing?
Fair enough, then how about regulating the healthcare industry? Big pharma and hospital networks have zero incentive to control costs. There’s no real competition.
From what I’ve understood from reading on the internet*, regulation is actively preventing competition (i.e. not being able to import cheaper drugs from abroad).
So yes, reasonable deregulation to permit more competition in at least some areas seems like a good idea.
The other elephant in the room is that the US is an over-litigious country. The costs of covering your ass are enormous. A lot of resistance to deregulation probably comes from that too.
I know exactly how you feel! I had an idea about 5 years ago that I felt could put our democracy back on the right track, but after a first try, took a break. Now, I CAN’T REST UNTIL IT’S DONE!
The idea is on the surface very simple. The more you think about it, however, the more you may see how it can be a game-changer: informed citizens, fact-based journalism, the antidote to online trolls… you name it. The most revolutionary part of this is: FOR ONCE, OUR KNOWLEDGE CAN BE CUMULATIVE (no more fishing around on the internet for a study that shows whether or not immigrants increase crime rates…)
So now people that disagree with an executive order that prevented Americans with valid green cards from returning home to their families, are “sore losers” who were bored and had nothing better to do than surf social media looking for something to protest? Perhaps a policy that singles out immigrants from seven countries based on religion is deeply unamerican. Perhaps a policy which ignores literally every country that sent 9/11 attackers to us is also irrational and ineffective.
That seems like a much more rational explanation than “y’know, those sore losers were just bored.”
In January 2009, when President Obama came into office, he inherited two controversial covert counterterrorism programs from George W. Bush: the rendition and harsh interrogation (including torture) of terrorist suspects, and the use of drones to kill terrorist suspects outside of traditional battlefields
Also
drone strikes (which have killed 3,922 people) occurred under both Republican and Democratic presidents
Drone programs exist not “because Obama made it so”, but because a) it already existed under Bush and b) from 2008-2016 drone technology became ever more cost effective and sophisticated tools of combat, plus vastly lowered risk. Imagine you are a politician, say Trump, or Obama, or Bush. You got a “bad dude” in some foreign country that needs to be taken out for reasons of national security or whatever.
Send in human soldiers with automatic rifles, who being human can and will make mistakes, and sadly become victims in combat, and their deaths are your fault. Because you ordered them in.
Send in a drone, which does exactly what you tell it to do, for better or worse, and if it is destroyed… it’s just equipment. Cheap equipment, at that, and getting cheaper every day.
Is this even a choice? #2 every time, and moreso every day.
I don’t have any particular opinions about drone programs. We’d be covertly killing “bad dudes” one way or another in these countries. And you can bet Trump will do just as much of it, if not more, than Obama – he’s a huge fan of military buildup and fighting “bad dudes”, but my estimate is largely based on drone technology becoming ever more viable and cheaper since 2008. Technology marches on. It’s so cheap now that homemade drones are being used to attack US soldiers:
And expanded upon them, yep that makes killing innocent people OK right? And somehow it’s not quite as terrible for you as barring people from entering this country for 90/120 days?
Given that we’ve descended into a pissing contest I should have been more specific in my definition of “sore losers.” These are liberal democrats who despise Trump, didn’t vote for him, sure as shit didn’t expect him to win and now all he needs to do to induce a protest is sneeze the wrong way.
That doesn’t change the fact that it happened on his watch, within the first 3 days of his presidency and he was fully briefed ahead of time. Why didn’t anyone protest? Well you wouldn’t have known about them without a FOIA, and those details weren’t released until July 2016. How come none of these people protested in July 2016 when the details came out? How come nobody’s up in arms over the secrecy of these programs that by the way also allowed them to drone American citizens overseas (both under Bush and Obama)? The United States Killed innocent people, good intentions or not, our government did it.
To whom? The innocent civilians?
Just because you don’t care, doesn’t make it right.
Yeah I don’t really get the disconnect between temporary immigration bans being the personification of evil and “collateral damage” from secret drone attacks being ‘shit happens’.
To me even the euphemism collateral damage is evil Newspeak.
Hi, I see a lot of intelligent people here from the left and the right and would like to engage in a topic of discussion that I think is either overlooked or people simply do not know. This is not a partisan issue. It took me years to figure it out and understand the system to get where I am now. I would like to ask you all a basic question.
Do you all know where money comes from?
I don’t mean “the bank”. I mean do you understand the actual process of money creation? I ask because I think that this election of Trump and this voice of the forgotten rural people is a direct result of wealth inequality based on money creation. Please reply with an answer on how money is created… I’ll reply with what I now know, and why I think that because of this fundamental issue, or lack of knowledge about this issue by both Democrats and Republicans, and the entire electorate we are in one hell of a mess. I would like to get this discussion started with some intelligent folks…
Patients get the money for healthcare by working. People must buy food, housing, electricity ect, (which are arguably more of a basic need than doctor visits) In a free country we get the freedom to decide how we allocate our resources. For younger people just getting started, buy a high deductible plan and save a little each month in an HSA. Slowly build up those funds to eventually offset your high deductible until you need it. Or if you can’t even afford a high deductible plan just save in the HSA and use it when you need it. HSA’s cause healthcare dollars to get competed for and consumers benefit. The older you get and the better you are doing financially, the better insurance you can afford. This is how it should work for the majority. For cases when people cannot afford insurance and God forbid something catastrophic happens to them, Go to the hospital and they will treat you regardless of your ability to pay. They will bill you, but if you can’t pay you can’t pay. Trust me, hospitals eat Billions of dollars from people who cannot pay.
I agree with you that we have a supply problem with doctors. How do we solve that? More completion with medical schools. Right now medical school prices are overinflated because of subsidies. The more money the government or other aid is thrown at Universities the more they raise the prices. Read This Higher education has inflated prices over the years far more than general inflation. Education should not be that expensive. You can learn to program for basically free.
The general theme reoccurs over and over and over. The free market works but people screw it up when we demand products or services as some sort of right and it gets subsidized. Lasik surgery for example is not covered by insurance. What happened to Lasik? The cost went way down and better procedures were invented to compete for those dollars. I digress. The laws of supply and demand can be no more manipulated by government then they can manipulate the law of gravity. Instead of fighting it we should embrace it. In fact America did, and that’s how our economy became the best in the world in a short period of time.
Well, the bottom line is we print it. And this is especially true in the U.S. The U.S. mint designs and prints the money, an amount decided by the U.S. Treasury (it also destroys “old money”), and then it is distributed to banks to make its way into the system. Here’s a light intro: Who Prints Money in the U.S.?
The thing is that if you print too much, your money becomes worth less (do you want your dollar to be as rare as gold, or as common as sand?), which causes inflation. But the U.S. has a very unique and privileged position by having the dollar as the de-facto universal currency: all our debts are in dollars (as with everyone else’s, for the most part), so there’s never a need to default on our debts. Need a trillion dollars? Sure, we’ll just print some more. What? The dollar is worth less now? That means so is our debt…
Anyway, not sure how this relates directly to your issues with the forgotten rural people… it’s not like the people printing the money just gets to put it in their pockets. Not exactly.
Money comes from the value of the goods or services you can produce.
Wealth inequality is not a bad thing. We should not strive for equality, we should strive for opportunity. The equality gap in 3rd world countries is extremely low, does that make them better off than of them us. Absolutely not.
When the economy grows the pie gets bigger. People have a misconception that there is a finite amount of wealth, this is completely false. I can sit with notepad and develop software that has value from nothing. That value was not stolen from anybody or any place.
But that’s my point. Nearly as many people felt that voting for Hillary would be betraying the fundamental principles that America was founded on. So if you have to choose between a tyrant who will destroy the country through bullheadedness or a career politician who will make the friends of Bill rich while making the middle class poorer, thus still destroying the country, just more slowly. If you think the Clintons are just harmless politicians you’ve been only reading/listening to one side.
You are saying that people should have voted for the lesser of two evils “because that’s the American thing to do”
No, sorry, that’s not the American thing to do. That’s still voting for evil. The right thing to do was to abstain, maybe protest and shout and fight. Maybe next time both parties can do better and give Americans someone worth voting for. Perhaps Trump will be painful enough that both parties will drastically change to keep this from happening again.
Let’s make it more clear. Should I vote for Stalin because I don’t want Hitler?
Would it be more American to vote for Stalin? Should I vote for Mussolini because I don’t want Hideki Tojo to be elected?
Nope. It’s not the voters in the general election who failed. The party system failed us. Both the Democrats and the Republicans failed us. This election was a failure long before November. There was no good outcome.
Cool thanks for the reply. I want to keep this thread positive and non-partisan since I am learning more everyday about this topic. Also it’s taken me a few years to understand so I’m looking to vet my thoughts with you guys.
So for me first I had no real idea how money came about I just earned it, used it, and saved it. You can describe printing it as one way to describe it. For me I first understood money creation to be fractional reserve banking. Then I found out, that this is simply a model they used to teach economy students so they can comprehend a sort of money multiplier effect of the banks based on a fractional reserve. Money printing then begs the question.
So for me the best way to describe it is this: Money gets created by banks from nothing, in response to the need for loans.
Banks simply credit your account when you need money, provided you are credit worthy. It works this way for people, business, and the government. Banks do it for you and me. The federal reserve (the bankers bank) does it for the government through government bonds, if the government’s need for funding exceeds what investors and governments around the world want to buy. The mint is responsible for creating physical printed money, but about 97% of our money is strictly digital and not printed.
Now for inflation, it’s true that printing too much money causes it, but it’s not just the printing of too much money that causes it. It’s actually the relationship of money to goods and services that are available for that money to buy that is the problem. For example if you simply print a trillion dollars and give it to people who will use it to buy things then you’ll see price inflation. If you give that trillion dollars to investors, then you will see asset price inflation. If however there is a corresponding increase of a trillion dollars of goods and services to correspond to that trillion dollars then there should be little inflation.
Ok, so you think “so what” about the creating of money. Well if you think about it hard, then you realize that this means literally that all of the money that we have and create, comes from debt. It’s logical since money comes into existence in response to loans/debt right? But then you realize what that means… If all our money is literally created from debt, then not all people/business/government can ever pay off their debt. If they did, there would be no money. When you pay back a loan to the bank, you are effectively destroying money - taking it out of existence. The reason this bothered me (at first) is that it means that at the federal level, we can never repay that debt. Since a child I was used to hearing how much the national debt was and how bad it is and what a burden it is on the future generations. Someone has to pay it back right? AND it’s looking like that’s going to be me and my kids… Dems and Republicans both blame each other for increasing the debt. BUT if all our money comes from debt, and our GDP has to keep increasing, there is literally no way to do that except to create more debt.
Think about it, if you balance the budget and have a surplus then the government is effectively choking the savings of business and people - causing them to drawn it down, and a recession is going to follow shortly. What is the response to a recession, the government spends the crap out of the economy to get it growing again, to get the debt growing again. I think it sucks but is the system we have.
SO now I believe that in fact the debt will have to grow if you wish to have a growing economy. Look at how much China’s economy has grown and if you look, then you realize that their debt has also grown to match. Banks control the amount of money that is in our economy, and the federal reserve tries to control that using interest rates.
Let me know what you think so far. Where I am going with this is that politics and politicians are so important because they control a huge amount of spending. We all argue about how much we spend on this and that, and how much we can afford to spend. I’ll continue after your and hopefully others feedback.
Isn’t price fixing one of the main features, if not the main feature of socialism? Socialism is the government ownership and administration of the means of production and the control over the distribution of goods. This means price fixing. It also means fixing the quantity of things produced. It also means fixing what is in fact to be produced.
I think it is safe to say that Venezuela’s main problem is in fact socialism.
I’m sure some people don’t want a wall on principle alone, but I’m really more about the economics and efficacy of a wall. I just don’t see as effective means to solve the problem that proponents say it will solve.
I’ve heard two justifications for “the wall”; undocumented workers (aka illegal immigrants) are taking our jobs, the drug trade is just too easy with an “open border”. But will a wall really change either of these?
We already have a “wall” over parts of the border, and it hasn’t even slowed down the drug trade. They simply throw the drugs over the wall, either by hand, by air cannon, or even in one case a catapult. They dig tunnels under the wall. The point is that you can spend a huge amount of money, and in the end they will continue to find a means to move drugs. Look today, we already employ thousands of people to patrol the border, cameras, drones, and who knows what else. But if there is a high enough demand for illegal drugs in the US, someone will find a way to supply them. So bottom line, until you diminish the demand, you will never win the “war on drugs” in that there are just too many ways to bring them into the country if there is financial incentive to do it. So you build an impenetrable wall, they will shift back to bringing drugs in by boat along the gulf coast. Sure it will cost them more, and maybe we catch a bit more, but in the end if the demand is there they will keep finding a way to get the get supply in. This is a war of attrition on their part, we can spend billions on a wall, they can build an air cannon for a few hundred and defeat it. So we add more tech, more monitoring. They look at some simple way to defeat it, the problem is that as long as we spending a lot more than they are on our side, we will always be losing.
As for jobs, I’ve already said, and stand by it that if we enforced our current labor laws we could diminish the illegal labor market significantly, likely to the point where it’s not a significant factor in our current job market. But for some reason, which I don’t understand fully, we can’t seem to figure out how to keep illegal immigrants from taking jobs. So while I agree we have pretty good technology, why can’t we get a workable system to determine if someone is legally able to work? The reality is that business profits from the illegal labor market, so there is no cry to enforce labor laws. Businesses will lobby that it’s too burdensome to have to document their workers more than they have to today, and they will win, because in the end the wall and the “Mexican” problem isn’t really about jobs. It’s about demonizing someone or something so that politicians can make “average job” feel better about himself. They need a scapegoat to make the voter feel like their lot in life is entirely because of some outside force, and that they can fix it for them. Mexico happens to be a great fit for this need, they are close, we have a lot of undocumented workers from Mexico, and at least a few news articles that show that they are “bad hombres”.
socialism - a political and economic theory of social organization that advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole.
I’m in Canada for example and our health care system you would consider to be socialism. But what we really (to my understanding) have is the government as a single payer (replacing all of different health insurance carriers that you have) who states how much they will pay per procedure and for prescriptions. The government then allow capitalism to provide the services that the government will pay for in our hospitals, clinics and doctors. The medical community here are still extremely wealthy, perhaps not as much as in the US, but close. But it does limit the costs that are paid, and people here do not have to pay separately for health coverage, it is provided by the government. This is the same system across the developed world in France, Britain, Sweden, etc. the US is the only anomaly where 100% of it’s citizens are not covered by their government.
I think the only way to really know the costs of say a drug is to crack open the books of a few big pharma companies and look at where their money really goes. And I don’t mean their public filings, this will take some forensic accounting, really digging into what are “marketing costs”, or “R&D”, or “litigation”. The reason I say this is that it’s way too easy to put a line item in a filing, but you really don’t know what went into something like litigation, was it costs in defending themselves, or suing other companies over patent rights? The point is that we often take the companies word for it, and don’t really dig into the data. I thought President Trump was going to be hard on big pharma and press for price bidding, but after he met with them he quickly fell back to that they need deregulation and tax breaks? What, if we lower their taxes we will get lower cost drugs? Isn’t that like just directly transferring the payment to them instead of through their products? So now the country takes on more debt so these guys can provide more profit on the products they already sell. Makes a lot of sense to me… And deregulation, hmmm, that sounds good and I’m sure we can do better there. I’m assuming they are asking for less oversight on bringing products to market, but based on history our for profit drug companies haven’t always been the most forthright about the products they sell, hence the regulation to begin with. When they drop products on the market with insufficient testing and it causes issues, then the pendulum swings the other way and people begin to demand again for the government to regulate. So this is one that we need to look hard at and decide where is a reasonable level of regulation.
That definition is fine too. The point is, you can’t have socialism without price fixing, fixing wages, fixing profits, fixing everything (which is of course why it does not work. That is the whole point of socialism. If you have markets (the free play of individuals making use of their knowledge within general rules of law) determining prices, wages, and profits this is called capitalism or freedom. Certainly in most modern functioning economies there are elements of socialism and capitalism and to the extent socialism dominates, the county will function less well. This is what happened to Venezuela - they went full socialism.
No Jeff, it’s even better than that, they are being paid by people like George Soros to go protest… Or so the conspiracy theory spinners out there seem to like to push. The thing I learn when I hear things like this is what motivates those who say it, and it’s money. The people who make this up are so motivated by money they can’t fathom that someone might actually get up off their butt and go protest something unless someone was paying them to do it. And to me that is probably one of the saddest statements on where we are a society today, that people can’t even see having motivation for anything unless it’s directly heading to benefit them, and not in some future way, but right now, in cash.
Hi, you have to open your mind, your train of thought. You think you either have socialism or capitalism. Socialism does not mean price fixing, wage fixing, profit fixing etc… This is not black and white. For example China is communist right, except they have totally embraced essentially a capitalism market economy… Canada is a socialist county - but we also have a capitalist market economy. For health care we fix prices that the government will pay, but wages and profits are not fixed. If a hospital wants more profit, they simply increase the services they can offer. BUT the government does limit how much they will pay for services so they can cover the entire population. Since they are a single payer they can negotiate the costs better.
What you really have to look at is who benefits from your system. This is my point for the banks too. If they have effectively unlimited ability to make loans, then their profit is only limited by finding customers to take out new loans. This is one of the reasons for the 2009 financial crisis - excessive lending to non-credit worthy clients (subprime mortgages).
Moving back to the central banks. Our federal governments in the US and Canada, have the ability to get their central banks to create money to fund them, we see this in the national debs we carry. In Canada the government of Canada owns the Bank of Canada, but in the US the Federal Reserve is owned by it’s private member banks so it’s effectively a private corporation. I think they do have to send their profits back to the treasury department though. What this means is that our government’s ability to fund services is limited by our own self imposed budgeting, and our fundamental understanding of debt. Both the US and Canada owe a majority of their debt, to themselves… It’s like you having your own printing press, and having to print your own money to pay yourself back.
For me the proof is in the reality that the US government can fully fund the military, but chooses to not be able to fully fund healthcare. They can fully fund assistance to other countries, but cannot fully fund university education. We see the same thing in Canada to a lesser extent since we spend much less on the military. So in the end the beneficiaries of this spending are those “wealthy” individuals who benefit from the money going from the government to their businesses. The short answer is for you to get into business and you don’t have to deal with this mess! The problem is that all those workers are being left behind as many of the businesses no longer pay a fair share to their employees. You also see then that as a direct function, the richer you become, the more of other people’s debt money you hold. This is the problem our money system creates, but to get rich is the American dream - every one’s dream.
If you look at it from say a billionaire’s perspective, if you were to allow money to filter down to the masses, through good jobs, high pay, good social benefits, etc. then you are effectively making yourself not as rich. From the billionaire’s view (dems and republicans are both here), you should restrict this as much as possible.
What I think is happening is that the poorest of the ones left behind are starting to revolt, what else can they do? The only way out if people are not helped by their government is through education. I look at everyone I know who got a good education and they are all doing well. Look at doctors, lawyers etc. Look at unionized employees like police, they are also doing well. But even in IT our jobs are being outsourced, we are also feeling the pinch.
I disagree with much of what Trump is doing since his win and when I first heard of this EO, it really frightened me. I do not agree with discrimination or hateful closing off of the borders. However, this blog post comes through as nothing more than cheap virtue signaling to impress fellow friends and buddies on the Left. All I see is narcissistic virtue signalling befitting of a future politician.
Where were you when Obama was blowing up weddings and violating the Constitution left and right? When did you stand up for Syrian refugees or for the truth, or do you only repeat what the media tells you? Have you even read the actual text of the executive order or only what CNN and your friends tell you? Why are you only speaking up now and didn’t speak up when Obama committed any of a similar number of abuses? Is it because he was the “cool” president and on your team?
The problems of America didn’t start with the election of Donald Trump and will not go away with the next Democrat in office and certainly not with Jeff Atwood in office. Until your group actually -understands- why the hell half the country voted for him and continues to ignore the very real problems of a biased media and a government that meets the needs of the elite first, you are very much part of the problem.
That was my position, too, at first. I like to give the benefit of the doubt. And, in fact, on paper, too, it is not a “Muslim ban”. But then Rudy Giuliani came on TV and stated flat out that Trump wanted to “ban Muslims” and asked him “how can I make it legal?”. So, no, it’s not a Muslim ban, but apparently that was the underlying intention after all.
Why is this different from Obama’s ban? First, he only did it for Iraq, for a very specific situation. Second, as I mentioned, it’s the intention. And believe me, having someone who in general supports refugees and immigrants do it is one thing. Having someone who speaks horrors about immigrants, is backed by the KKK, and has Steve Bannon on his NSC is another.
Ask me why I can’t say the “N” word, but Obama can. I believe you might see a parallel.
Yeah, I’ve thought about that. I’m VERY sure there are some real answers out there from people who study this for a living. But since I haven’t I wonder the following things:
Would this really be enforceable? Depending on how the enforcement is done, it either becomes a risk business owners will take, just a “cost of doing business”, or something not worth risking (jail time?), which would then be a huge shock to the system we probably don’t want.
What if we legalized the current undocumented workers and took it from there? Would the businesses “profiting” off of illegals be able to stay in business? What would happen if they couldn’t?
If there are whole business models that depend on a working underclass with below minimum wage and no benefits, would our society stand for officially creating that underclass (something like a nationwide Bracero Program)?
The point is there are serious economic shifts that would have to happen, and I don’t know what that would look like.
As I said in a previous post, almost all countries today have a mix of socialism and freedom. If socialism means anything, it means to “fix” some real or imaginied undesirable outcome of freedom. This means using force (the state) to fix prices or output or wages or profits or wealth or some or all of these. This can be done economy wide or in a greater or lesser degree in specific industries. Regardless, socialism entails using force to alter the results of capitalism and freedom and the attendant spontaneous order.
If it does not require force through price fixing, wage fixing, profit fixing, disallowing entry into an industry, etc., then its not socialism.
And you keep dodging the point. There is literally, not figuratively, no ban based on Muslims. The ban is exclusive to citizens of seven countries. I don’t see why you can’t acknowledge that.
The nuclear doomsday clock was just moved as close to midnight as it has been in 64 years.
Which is weird because it didn’t get any further when Obama pledged to speed up the destruction of nuclear weapons and didn’t get closer when Obama slowed the destruction of nuclear weapons. Also, your statement of closest in 64 yrs. is a bit amiss but doesn’t refute the larger point that at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the clock was further away from midnight than it is now. I don’t like Trump. I don’t like his rhetoric or his policy. I strongly doubt the clock’s veracity at measuring… anything.
America was downgraded from a Democracy to a Flawed Democracy.
Again, many of the countries ranked as ‘Full Democracies’ are exceedingly racially monolithic, have few or no legal protections of religion or speech of any kind, and have ‘white national’ elements that rather effectively fueled Nazism and put American racism/white nationalism to shame. Moreover, the United States, since it’s inception, has been a Federated Constituional Republic rather than a Democracy and even that was rather explicitly created to combat a ‘tyrrany of the majority’, mob rule, or… pure democracy.
Our country executed Timothy McVeigh, it’s exceedingly likely we will likely execute Dylan Roof. Anders Breivik, OTOH, will likely serve his 21 yr. maximum and be released.
That’s why when you schedule your physical you go to Google and find the cheapest doctor with a excellent ratings/reviews right? Because it’s free market/capitalism at work?
You aren’t free to pick any insurance plan on the market, you’re constrained by (typically) what your employer has blessed. Not a free market.
When my doctor prescribed me an antibiotic for my ear infection did I get a choice of drugs/brands/pharmacies based on what it will cost me?
If that’s your idea of capitalism and freedom as it pertains to healthcare then I want what the other guy’s having.
You make excellent points and I have no idea why you think I would disagree with you on this. The health care industry in the US, even before Obamacare, was one of the most government controlled industries in the country, perhaps after primary education. It would be a lot better if there was less government involvement in health care and more freedom.
Agreed, removing a huge chunk of the labor pool could have some huge repercussions. But as Heinlein would say, “TANSTAAFL”, so someone has to pay for the results of what we do, no matter what they are. But the stated goal of a wall seems to be to stop those pesky illegal immigrants from stealing our jobs. Or I guess its to keep the rapist and murderers on their side of the border, though if we had 11 million rapist and murders here from Mexico I’d have to guess our crime rate would be much higher than what it is today, or these are the absolute worst rapists and murderers the world has ever seen. Not such “bad hombres” I guess after all.
The reality as I see it is the wall is not an effective means to do anything but to take abstract ideas and turn it into a physical edifice. Think of it as a monument, it’s a show of strength, a show of how we have the ability to “protect” our country from others. President Trump has a background in construction, he builds things. I’m in software, I build things too. If I were asked how to fix the problem I’d probably fall back on building software, it’s what I’m good at. For President Trump he builds walls, so he falls back on his experience there as well. He will build a wall. And as it was said somewhere on this thread, “it’s just common sense that a wall will keep people out”. So a simple idea for a complex problem. People like that, don’t muddy things up, make it simple. And to some degree for President Trump it’s his Space Race, his grand challenge to show how great he can pull an idea together and follow through with it. Originally I think it was a means to weave a story of how great he was at negotiating; he said “I’m so good, I can build a huge wall, and get Mexico to pay for it”. It was his way of saying he was such a tough negotiator that he could get someone to pay him to do something they didn’t even want. He got cheers for that from his supporters, so he kept saying it over and over and it took on a life of it’s own. For many became a symbol of their struggle and it embodied what they saw as what was wrong with America. It’s those illegals, stealing their jobs, using their hospitals, stealing their tax dollars by being on welfare; it embodied all the things that they saw that were against their beliefs of what American really was supposed to be. So now they have it in their heads now that if we only have a wall all those things would be fixed. So now there is a demand for it, rational or not, because it’s become a symbol of “making us great again”. I’m not even sure what “Make America Great Again” means, and I’m pretty sure it means something different to everyone. But for many I think they got it in their heads that if we just had a wall…
Ironic that as I write this I’m listening to Pink Floyd, “The Wall” soundtrack, and the lyrics are playing “Mother should I build the wall, Mother should I run for President, Mother should I trust the government”.
Nick, you’re assuming Trump’s intentions were good, as Jeff has done as it relates to Obama and some of the “sins” he’s committed.
So let’s consider that Trump’s intent wasn’t to ban “good” muslims, he wanted to ensure “extremist” muslims from nations that we’re bombing back to the stone-age didn’t make it into this country. Unfortunately there’s no sure-fire way to identify these people, so you throw out the baby (good muslims) out with the bathwater (extremist muslims.) Because we are the United States of America, you can’t just outright ban all muslims coming from those countries because it targets a specific religion and that’s bad for optics, it would be unconstitutional and all that good stuff (that’s my technical jargon for additional side-effects.) So they do the next best thing and ban everyone from those countries, which is really just a defacto muslim ban from those nations.
It’s not a huge leap in my mind to believe that’s how this played out - that’s from someone who voted for Trump, and you can bet his critics have connected the dots.
Do you believe that the media is biased in only one direction? Watching Fox makes me sick to my stomach. Same for MSNBC, and sadly CNN (or maybe they were always biased and I just never saw it.)
Nobody cares about objective reporting, nobody controlling the networks anyway.
That is so important that I’m willing to overlook everything else.
