In some ways, Australia is actually worse than America. Not like, in terms of how “good” the overall system is. We’ve got you way beat there. But in terms of it being “a scam”.
We have a really good public healthcare system called Medicare. But, if you’re over 30, you’re required to take out private health insurance anyway, or you pay the “Medicare Levy Surcharge” if you have above certain thresholds of income. This levy is not marginal, so you could theoretically take home less pay after getting a pay raise if it puts you over the next threshold.
Additionally, if you later do sign up for private health insurance, you pay an addition levy of 2% on top of the normal premiums for every year you waited. So sign up at 40 and you pay 20% more for insurance than you otherwise would have.
All this means more funding being funneled into the private health sector, taking resources away from the public system, increasing wait times for non-urgent procedures—except for those willing and able to pay to cut the queue. If that’s not a scam, I don’t know what is.
Their logic is “it gets people out of the public system to take burden out of the public system”. Neglecting completely the economies of scale that would be involved if the public system got all of that funding.
conservative governments in Australia have been trying to kill off medicare and other public services for a long time. the problem is our progressive governments have refused to push back hard enough as it always results in election losses.
Basically the people are stupid, the media influences them, and the government is too spineless to take the risk needed to fix things.
I have bad signal so I can’t find the sources for you, but if you look up something like “diamonds artificial supply limiting” you should find it.
Basically the diamond industry has a stranglehold on the supply of natural diamonds (which are also notoriously mined under horrid conditions - i.e. “blood diamonds”) and they artifitially alter the supply/demand ratio by limiting what goes onto market to jack up the price. Naturally, diamonds are actually a very common gemstone, and they can be easily created in a lab. They’re just hyper-compressed carbon, after all, and carbon is abundant on earth. Rubys, sapphires, and the like are much naturally rarer, but don’t fetch as high a price because of the market manipulation around diamonds.
Don’t forget that there used to be literal assassins that would kill you if you tried to sell (as a retailer, obviously the resale by individuals was so small-time they didn’t care and hard to track) under the price you were told to sell it.
which are also notoriously mined under horrid conditions - i.e. “blood diamonds”
Not only are blood diamonds mined under bad conditions, they are mined in mines owned/controlled by insurgents and terrorist groups, and then the sale of these diamonds is used to fund the activities of these groups. Watchdog organizations are a lot more careful about blood diamonds these days than they were 20 years ago, but it’s still possible to accidentally get ahold of one. That’s why it’s so bad to buy one and it’s why people all over the world made a fuss about them back around 2000 - 2003, because buying one directly funds atrocities in central Africa. They’re usually sold cheaper than the monopolized diamonds too.
Windows. You pay ~100€ just to give your personal data to MS and get a bloated OS that will use all of your resources. Even MacOS is a more fair deal than this.
I agree that it’s not great that telemetry is shared, but to say that you buy it “just” to share your data is an exaggeration. I am sure you do useful things with it.
That said, yes, it is bloated and I wish you could really turn off all telemetry. Am totally with you on that.
Last time i paid for windows was 98se. And xp, but that was a blatant illegal copy (from a legit store, with new laptop). Back then it was far too expensive, but still worth it compared to win1x now.
I’ve owned probably 45 computers or more in my life and I’ve never paid Microsoft for shit. Saying Windows is a scam is rather stupid, you can literally disable telemetry and it’s still the best OS available right now regardless of your emotions.
What makes it the best os? Even without telemetry, it has a huge memory and CPU footprint from a bunch of bloat services running, restricts/blocks functionality even from admin users, and is very inflexible. The only thing that kept me having a windows partition was gaming - but now a vast majority of games (and other software without official Linux support) can be played with wine/proton. My PC idles at 0%-2% CPU usage and about 6 GB of ram, and basically all of that ram comes from me self hosting a good number of docker containers. And even that aside, windows collects data from a lot more than just the telemetry option
Memory you aren’t using is wasted memory. You should really look into understanding super fetch and the reason Windows “wastes” memory, reality is it’s sitting files that have common usage in memory so it isn’t constantly pulling them from drives. I mean just the fact that people are running Windows 11 smoothly on Chromebooks with 32gb of emmc 1.5ghz processors and 2gb of memory stands to make your entire statement pretty silly.
Of the three major desktop operating systems, windows is by far the worst.
The only advantage windows has is that Microsoft’s monopolistic practices in the 90s and 00s made it the de-facto OS for business to furnish employees with, which resulted in it still having better 3rd party software support than the alternatives.
As an OS, it’s hard to use, doesn’t follow logical convention’s, is super opinionated about how users should interact with it, and is missing basic usability features that have been in every other modern OS for 10+ years. It’s awesome as a video game console, barely useable as an adobe or autodesk machine, but sucks as a general purpose OS.
hard to use, doesn’t follow logical convention’s, is super opinionated about how users should interact with it, and is missing basic usability features that have been in every other modern OS for 10+ years
MacOS is an excellent workspace operating system, largely due to its near-POSIX compliance and the fact that it has access to the enormous body of tools developed for UNIX-like OSs. For development work in particular, it can use the same free and open source software, configured in the same way, that Linux uses. Aside from the DE, a developer could swap between Linux and MacOS and barely realize it. Everything from Node, to Clang, to openJDK, to Rust, along with endless ecosystems of tooling, is installable in a consistent way that matches the bulk of online documentation. This is largely in contrast to Windows, where every piece of the puzzle will have a number of gotchas and footguns, especially when dealing with having multiple environments installed.
From a design perspective, MacOS is opinionated, but feels like it’s put together by experts in UX. Its high usability is at least partially due to its simplicity and consistency, which in my opinion are hallmarks of well-designed software. MacOS also provides enough access through the Accessibility API to largely rebuild the WM, so those who don’t like the defaults have options.
The most frequent complaint that I hear about MacOS is that x feature doesn’t work like it does in windows, even though the way that x feature works in windows is steaming hot garbage. Someone who’s used to Windows would probably need a few hours/days to become as fluent with MacOS, depending on their computer literacy.
People also complain about the fact that MacOS leverages a lot of FOSS software, while keeping their software closed-source and proprietary. I agree with this criticism, but I don’t think it has anything to do with how usable MacOS is.
I’m not going to start a flame war about mobile OSs because I don’t use a mobile OS as my primary productivity device (and neither should you, but I’m not your mom). The differences between mobile OSs are much smaller, and are virtually all subjective.
Everything you just said is just… So incorrect. I don’t even know where to begin. With just saying it’s difficult to use, like what the hell are you on? How disillusioned are you that you actually feel that is a true statement?? If anything is the only OS using logical conventions, just in the simple concept of it being the most well known and common is in the world for desktop use.
I don’t even know how to start with the basic usability functions that you claim are missing but as a long time Linux user I’m very interested to see what examples you give because I’m sure everyone is interested.
Having the highest market share doesn’t mean that windows uses logical conventions, it just means that lots of people are accustomed to the conventions that it uses. The vast majority of professionals that I’ve interacted with strongly dislike having to work on a windows machine once they’ve been exposed to anything else.
Off of the top of my head, the illogical conventions that Windows uses are: storing application and OS settings together in an opaque and dangerous, globally-editable database (the registry), obfuscating the way that disks are mounted to the file system, using /cr/lf for new lines, using a backslash for directory mappings, not having anything close to a POSIX compatible scripting language, the stranglehold that “wizards” have on the OS at every level, etc. ad nausium. Most of these issues are due to Microsoft deciding to reinvent the wheel instead of conforming to existing conventions. Some of the differences are only annoying because they pick the exact opposite convention that everyone else uses (path separators, line endings), and some of them are annoying because they’re an objectively worse solution than what exists everywhere else (the registry, installation/uninstallation via wizards spawned by a settings menu).
For basic usability functions, see the lack of functional multi-desktop support 20 years after it became mainstream elsewhere. There is actually no way to switch one monitor to a 2nd workspace without switching every monitor, which makes the feature worse than useless for any serious work. In addition to that, window management in general is completely barebones. Multitasking requires you to either click on icons every time you want to switch a window, or cycle through all of your open windows with alt-tab. The file manager is kludgy and full of opinionated defaults that mysteriously only serve to make it worse at just showing files. The stock terminal emulator is something out of 1995, the new one that can be optionally enabled as a feature is better, but it still exposes a pair of painful options for shells. With WSL, the windows terminal suddenly becomes pretty useful, but having to use a Linux abstraction layer just serves to support the point that windows sucks.
I could go on and on all day, I’m a SWE with a decade of experience using Linux, 3 decades using Windows, and a few years on Mac here and there. I love my windows machine at home… as a gaming console. Having to do serious work in windows is agonizing.
I use windows for ~10 hours per day, 5 or 6 days per week because my team is currently maintaining a legacy .NET framework codebase. I’m sure there are people on earth who use windows more than I do, but I think it’s extremely unlikely that you’re one of them.
Microsoft literally used to make it part of their OEM agreement that manufacturers couldn’t bundle their machines with anything but Windows, you’ve paid for it in the form of reduced competition in the OS market.
Americans take it as received wisdom that homes are meant to generate income through higher valuations over time. We just assume home prices go up over time and if it’s not actively increasing in value, the home was a failure.
Many other countries don’t treat homes this way. They are dwellings, invest what you want to your liking, but it’s not a retirement account.
This focus on wealth generation creates lots of perverse incentives, such as exclusionary zoning, building on lots that are overly large, and suburban sprawl. These don’t reflect people’s actual, desired form of housing but rather maximize wealth for homeowners at the expense of everyone else.
We have a completely warped view of housing that causes us to be preyed upon by real estate agents, landlords, HOAs and the like.
Agreed! I miss my Samsung CLP. That was a real battle horse!
Yet, the talk was about printer ink and it is really hard to beat the price for that much ink, for those machines.
Fun fact: I don’t even own one of those machines. I have a Canon. Still cheaper than HP cartridges but those assholes tie the entire machine operation to the cartridges.
Those ink tank printers are their own kind of scam though, they clog if you dont use them frequently enough, and they use a non-replaceable dump pad when cleaning and purging that effectively bricks the printers when it is considred full, which is usually just a timer, not an actual sensor.
I would argue that feudalism is a lot more time tested than this garbage system that even in theory is so flawed that it regularly results in global economic crises. Feudalism on the other hand has been considerably more stable throughout the centuries and whether or not you are forced to serve a nobleman or a CEO is not a big difference. So, stop getting scammed and get back to the fields, peasant.
There is no stable alternative. There is always going to be class struggle. Materialist conditions and human rights must always be fought for and defended, else you’re gonna lose them.
There is a reason I reply to lemmygrad and hexbear people, and follow some of the communities. Sometimes I get interesting responses. Not your response, but sometimes.
No, but you didn’t need to engage in circle-jerking with your friends either. You are capable of more, and I look forward to reading your future contributions.
Me? I’m pretty open minded, while trying to apply critical thinking. Make a good argument, and I’ll digest it. You seem to be jumping to conclusions, which may hurt your cause.
Which communists? The USSR was infiltrated and the US then spent millions getting the bumbling mass of ethanol known as Yeltsin to win an election. They (the new capitalist government) even sieged the parliament building and sent tanks in Moscow to disperse the huge waves of protestors. It then lead to one of the worst humanitarian crisis in the modern age almost overnight.
And in China they are assuredly not capitalist, this becomes very clear once you read Deng Xiaoping. It’s Schroedinger’s China: when they do something bad they’re communists, and when they do something good (like lifting people out of poverty) they’re capitalists.
Cuba is still socialist, DPRK is still socialist, Vietnam is also reforming and opening up kinda like China did but a bit differently so still socialist
Are we really denying that the “Chinese Characteristics” of the PRC’s “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics” is Capitalism? Btw, I think the good parts of China are the socialism bits.
capitalism is not bits and pieces here and there, it’s an entire mode of production with its own base and superstructure. In that sense China can’t be called capitalist. At best we could say it has “capitalist elements” but even then that’s a stretch when getting down into the details of what these elements actually are.
I mean, some (most? Idk) of the means of production are owned by the state (ostensibly a proxy for the people, I’d rather it was more direct but the government has consistently high approval so I’ll give it a pass) and those are clearly socialistic.
But there are certainly factories and what not owned by capitalists, and as that accounts for much of the production that goes on in China, and as these products are not destined to serve the public weal but rather to be sent abroad as bits and bobs to be sold and promptly thrown away as serves global capital, I really don’t get the desire to not call this capitalism.
China, to me, has a very clear mixed economy with elements of both socialism and capitalism.
But as I’ve argued, having elements of capitalism like commodity production (and the subsequent export of these commodities) does not make China capitalist by themselves, which is also the original point I was making, that China has not “turned” to capitalism* like OP might have implied.
Markets are not inherently capitalist, and these capitalist elements in China allow them to build their productive forces which are required to achieve socialism, they’re also the same commodities they build for the Belt and Road initiative, for example 😁
Capitalism can be summed up in many ways, and one of them is production for the sake of finding a market and making money. There is capital in China (in the marxist definition) and people can make money, but while these capitalist want to simply make more money, for the Chinese government the goal is to build up production and achieve socialism, hence why the superstructure of China vs. any country in the imperial core is different. In the first case (capitalism) we’ll just keep producing and creating markets infinitely, the “anarchy of production and socialisation of labour”, and in the second case they’re using some methods (with the consequences that come with it -> if you make a factory to produce stuff, you will have to find a market to buy that stuff so you can produce more stuff) as a stepping stone until they don’t need to any more.
Of course the superstructure is predicated on the base, and in China for example land is leased to businesses, but never sold, and the government can take back their property at any time, including whatever is on it. It’s fundamentally different to capitalism in the west.
The CPC controls all capital in the country. They are coordinating and intervening in the economy with the goal of building a socialist society. This is very different from the US and it’s client states. Capital is controlled by the bourgeois, with no obligations other than a gluttonous desire to accumulate.
The United States health insurance system. It’s such a for-profit racket that more taxpayer money goes into it per capita than any other system out there and its outcomes are worse and shittier.
I went to hospital ER once after being literally unable to walk (unknown spinal issue). After 4 hours, they took Xrays, gave me a steroid shot and some extra-strength Tylenol, told me I have mild scoliosis, and then discharged me. I was bedridden for nearly 2 months after that. I then received a bill for 4000$.
Would medicare for all be a good next step to push for? Are any progressive politicians putting forth a viable plan for getting us closer to universal healthcare?
It’s not the worst next step, but Medicare is far from a perfect system.
Just the question of what’s covered can sometimes be almost as complex as tax code. It also carries a 20% coinsurance, which for big ticket stuff can still bankrupt you in a hurry. And there’s a big push towards privatization/contracting out the administration to the big companies.
The one thing Medicare does well is that it covers everyone. Hit 65 years old and you’re in. It’s an entitlement. There’s a lot to be said for establishing a standard of health care coverage as an entitlement (veeeery loosely translated as “human right”) no matter what age.
american healthcare will continue to suck as long as politicians are friends of instead enemies of private health insurance. as long as both parties are on payroll of big insurance we’re all getting screwed
Credit scores. It goes up when you have more debt and goes down when you pay your debt off, but it goes down if you ask for a loan and it goes down if you even try to check what it is.
It doesn’t usually go down when you pay debt off. In fact, paying off all your credit card debt every single month is a great strategy that will get you a good credit score. And is ideal, because that way you avoid the high interest rates that credit cards have.
It also doesn’t go down if you check it with sites like Credit Karma. I believe what you’re thinking of is hard checks, which loan issuers use and they can slightly ding your score as they represent you about to get a new line of credit. Though honestly that part is pretty sketchy, since it applies even if you don’t get a new loan.
I’ve got dings on my credit report for no debt lol. I get dings for not using enough of my credit limit and also for using too much. It’s a stupid system that exists to measure how easily banks can fleece you.
It’s not about paying it off, it’s about closing an account. When you pay a loan off the account closes, and that’s where you get dinged. Paying off a credit card isn’t a problem, because the account is still active.
Yes that’s not my experience. It’s a measure of how responsibly you utilize your debt. They like to see you use your debt. But they like to see you pay it off. They don’t like for you to sit at a high percentage of debt. And they like to see that you’ve used your debt responsibly for an extended period of time
They want you in debt so you’re forced to work, and so that they can grift interest money off you. According to their system it’s irresponsible to not have debt, and it’s also irresponsible to ask what their magic number is.
This person is passionately against something they have convinced themselves they fully understand without having any real idea wtf they are talking about. Reading his comments is reminiscent of my mother arguing to me that cost of living isn’t real, such pointless garbage and she gets upset unless you just nod your head and act enlightened somehow. Reading his comments, he’s convinced himself of how the credit rating system is bad, likely reinforced by misunderstood anecdotal evidence and other ignorant people sharing their anecdotal misunderstood experiences, or even made up hogwash. So much so that he digs his heels in and refuses to learn anything that would even allow him to form a valid critique against the credit rating system, preferring instead to be convinced he is infallible and enlightened while loudly spewing confidently incorrect bullshit.
It’s so stupid, in a state with a communist vanguard party a social credit system is unironically better since it marks a step towards a classless moneyless society that the American credit score system is antithetical towards.
Our credit system must work differently here in Australia, because the only thing I think brings it down is not paying, defaulting, bankruptcy, etc. I have an excellent credit rating and I’ve had debts for years.
Is it normalized? I very rarely hear anyone taking homeopathic medicine or advocating for it. But I live in Norway, so maybe this is a thing elsewhere?
I agree that I never ear anyone I know tell me they use it, but they are sold in every drug store here in Canada so people must buy them, otherwise they would be bankrupt.
Maybe there’s better examples. Maybe glasses. Like 500$ for plastic. More people are buying online though these days.
Have you ever seen stuff like Occillococcinum or most things by company Boiron? They don’t advertise it as homeopathy, so even if you saw a homeopathic sugar pill you wouldn’t necessarily know. That’s a part of the scam
It is very normalized in the south of Germany, but generally Germany is very pro homeopathy so so it is even subsided by the public health care system.
In Germany, a lot of medicine can only be sold in very regulated apothecaries. Those stores are allowed to recommend and sell homeopathy. There’s even a state-exam for homeopath. Though for that you only have to demonstrate you won’t kill your patients, not that you can actually help.
This is the real answer to this question. Not just an invention to unfairly evaluate folks (and charge them originally to see it!), but nothing more than a “how much we can fleece you for” score that has become so widely embraced you can’t ignore it.
Credit scores are at least significantly better than the system that preceded them. On the other hand the system that preceded credit scores was so broken and so racist that pretty much anything would be a significant amount of progress in the right direction
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