CIRCLE WITH A DOT

@foone Ahh, yes. Pepperidge farms remembers giving his mom a heart attack with the bill for a two hour phone call to a now-infamous german BBS in 1987. Also remembers tracking down a captain crunch whistle after the savage & reflectively probably well deserved beating he endured over said bill.

@aram Criminalization of opponents, rivals & detractors is tyrant 101. But i'm guessing you knew that already. My grandpappy put seven nazis in the dirt during his tour. He swore all his descendants to fighting that sort of thing if it ever arose here.
I bear no illusions. They gonna round us up eventually. Expedience will determine whether we die of neglect in a remote forced labor camp somewhere or in a death camp by intent. Our best odds are fighting it are before getting shipped off.

@ShredderFeeder Uhm.....Catholics on line two. They'd like a word with you about this 'classless heaven' presumption.

@ana regardless, if/when they get anywhere near it there there will be tens of thousands of onlyfans girls out of a job.
So it could be argued it's impact will be felt equally. :))

@benroyce *sigh* No, Pollyanna. I'm just aware that a cult of personality is already actively looking to bend the election in every way they accused their rivals of since 2020. That they'll deploy the cambridge analytica 2.0 they used to bend the last election causing MILLIONS to sit out the vote on the midterms too.
Boss Tweeds playbook is back in town, and will curb stomp your california dreaming hippie ass if you presume any part of this upcoming election will be business as usual.
Jackass.

@benroyce Whatever led you to believe these midterms will be free & fair in any way? My aren't you a trusting soul. Bought any bridges yet?

@passwordsarehard4 @GeePawHill To change the health care program in this country would require breaking it down into about 7-8 project boxes. They could be tackled one by one by a smaller, deeply dedicated & funded group over a longer period or more broadly by a medium sized & funded group over a moderate period. over 20 years for the former. Maybe 10+ years the latter. Most of it tied up in litigation. Once that deck was cleared THEN you could implement legislation with good odds of it sticking

@passwordsarehard4 @GeePawHill Great example, but not the way you mean. The RNC had a longgame that was set to start paying out by this year called "Hardball". Instead a charasmatic came along, hijacked it 2/3rds in, and buttonholed them into a high risk, high reward but low success odd play for the whole cookie. It's creating pushback across more channels than they can keep up with.
...And if it loses, they've created so much broad resentment it'll cost them 20 or even 30 years of gains.

@VW_Guy @GeePawHill Not trying to bum you out or anything. But someone needs be the voice of practicality. Too many people think this is an easier proposition that it is. Our medical sector didnt get this fucked up & whacked out overnight. It's accreted into it's present form presiding over the last 70 years of the most impactful medical progress ever made in human history. Its created powerful lobbies & entrenched interests. They all have to be knocked down, moved aside or brought onboard.

@VW_Guy @GeePawHill As a personal note aside, I think that Singapore has the most viable model that we could template off of. Socialist models don't scale readily, you see. All socialist models for health care or any other social program fragment when presented with culturally non-homogeneous populations, large geographic areas to cover or populations of over 32-34 million (give or take). The USA is all three.

@VW_Guy @GeePawHill eh, the failure to date has always come down to implementation. This can't be solved by the swish of a legislative pen alone. There's entrenched vested interests with the pull to push back. The only reasonable path towards such a destination would literally take over a decade, maybe as much as two. You'd have to knock down, onboard, distract or outright threaten six different & distinct subsections of the medical sector to clear the way.

@albertcardona Now i'd stress the importance of contractual guarantees beforehand. IRONCLAD ones. The man is Lt Colonel of the ADHD brigade. The only thing that changes faster than his whimsey is how many women he's fathered children with. So it'd have to be moved to some sort of trust to have any guarantee of permanence. But for him, it would be a massive writeoff on an asset set to go fallow he'd still be paying taxes on. It's a win/win for both parties & FOR SCIENCE!<In best dexters lab riff>

@albertcardona Let us take advantage of someone elses distress. Insomch as it can be considered that given who i'm about to suggest. I just read a few days ago that Elon Musk was mothballing one of his big server farms. Now i'm no fan of the man, personally. But he *IS* easy to sway, with the right kind of argument & pitch, which this fits VERY neatly.
What if an appeal was made to host all that data at his fancy shmancy server farm he's about to let go fallow? It'd be a tax writeoff for him.

@albertcardona Agree. Thousands of hours of stupid cat videos are produced & stored every minute but there's no provisioning for research data? Databrokers accrue (as of 2017) 2.7 Mb of data on every American every day, but we can't find the fucking storage for decades of empirical findings? It's a serious priorities alignment mismatch.
...Maybe the framing is wrong.
O_o
Just had a bit of inspiration whisper in my ear. Hear me out, doc. It may sound a little crazy, but it might just work!

@skeletor *sigh* yeah. It's consumed the last ten years of my life. I had other plans for my retirement, dammit. Being reduced to soaking up endless punishment trying to convince otherwise smart people into acting in their own collective survival interest has proven to be exhausting & thankless work.

@rbreich Intentionally, I strongly suspect. Yes. You familiar with the deeper meaning behind "après moi le deluge"? It's very much in play here.

Y'see, the critical flaw in the premise of Hanlon's Razor is that it ignores that BOTH states can be true. They are not mutually exclusive.

@torproject Could you meaningfully change it, even if you did? Pretty wide divide between what *should* be done and what *can* be done. Think it might be a better time investment at this point to start concentrating on outliving it. Being in an opportune position to replace it once it collapses under the collective weight of it's own toxic presumptions & ambitions.
Can't save a man who wants to drown. You can only choose whether you'll drown alongside him in the attempt or not.

@GeePawHill Fantastic plan. Call us back when you can wrangle a viable & pragmatic plan for it's implementation. Bear in mind that by necessity it'll have to include shifting the culture & practices of half a dozen ecosystems in that sector constellation before any attempt to address it at the legislative level can be successful. Plan on about a 14-20 year commitment. Bring a bunch of lawyers. You'll need 'em!

Good luck!

@kdwarn Eh, with one caveat. The USA did pursue some imperialist practices pre world war one, but we'd largely ended those practices by 1908. (Might have been 1912. Forgive my aging memory) It was more of a 'we did it because everyone was doing it' sort of geopolitical thing. EG the international 'norm' Once we'd decided we were going to encourage/endorse ending of colonialism practices globally we abandoned those overtones at the policy level.

@kdwarn Also...Are you aware of how imperialism actually worked? I suggest a full review & comparison before jumping to such a conclusion. That whole 'imperialist' tag was an outcropping of soviet propaganda that cemented itself in the western mindset as a sort of proto-meme. The USA was in most ways a direct opposite of imperialism. The marshall plan would have never have taken place were it true. There were some bad actor companies that did bad shit despite it, but not as a matter of US policy