Granted. You now lose 35% of your income before you even receive it even paycheck, foreigners often get attended to despite not having submitted any of their paychecks, there's always a significant waiting list for anything serious upto multiple years for something like a hip replacement and you'll commonly find yourself wishing you had a it more income like your wealthier friends so you could afford to pay for private care and get a significantly better experience.
He asked for free healthcare in his country. I described what it looks like everywhere else as well as what the uneducated think "free" is. Seems I hit some nerves.
As someone not from the US and from one of those systems, that's exactly how it works but enjoy your copium. Or, you know, tell me what's so "fundamentally" misunderstood? After all, laughing and pointing achieves nothing if you're trying to prove someone wrong.
Granted. You didn’t define the word “free”. Everything now costs so much more, and it’s all unregulated. Doctors perform surgeries that aren’t necessary. They prescribe extremely harmful drugs. Going to a doctor is now just as risky as trying to deal with the disease by yourself. There are doctors on every street corner offering cures that don’t work, and you can’t tell the difference between a good doctor and a quack.
Pharmaceutical companies now freely and openly push doctors to prescribe more drugs that don’t work. They increase prices astronomically. Even an Advil costs over $100.
The death rate increases, and everyone tries to deal with their dead themselves because having a hospital deal with bodies is too expensive. This leads to an even further spread of disease.
Granted. If you choose to participate your likeness, fingerprints, dna, medical history, and potential children naming rights now belong to some tech startup without proper data security.
Your belly distends and you feel a horrible pain. Congratulations, it's a boy! Enjoy your two whole weeks of maternity leave. And don't worry about giving insufficient notice, your employer will just deduct it from your vacation time.
I read "Mein Kampf." Hitler said something in it that really stuck with me. Basically: The people do not want democracy. They don't feel qualified. If you tell them they need to be the ones to chart the course for the country, they'll get uncomfortable, because they don't feel they have a good grasp of the issues and they have enough on their plate with their daily lives.
What they want is for someone to say: I understand the issues, I know exactly what to do, I'm strong enough to keep you safe and solve the problems. Don't worry about it. I can take care of it if you just put me in charge. I'll get rid of our anxieties about the world and make things good and everything will be fine. That's the type of leader and government they gravitate to, not someone who'll go into all the details or tell them that they get to make the decisions.
I do not agree with his prescription for what makes good government (hopefully goes without saying), but his grasp of how people operate, I think was spot-on.
Wish granted. Because the personal is political, in some sense everyone is a politician, so it affects everyone. With no one left standing that has any shred of electability, we delegate the role of politician to various LLM chatbots. They run everything into the ground in fairly short order, but on the bright side hijinks aplenty ensue and it's pretty amusing to watch.
Granted. Everything is now extraordinarily boring and complicated, with every time someone opens their mouth, a long, dry, analytical summary of various problems and different theoretical solutions is given, with a long, nuanced list of potential pros and cons for each, presented in a realistic way where it is made apparent that not everyone can be made happy.
With no drama anymore, active voting percentage drops to the low double-digits for a period. Eventually populism disappears and only policy wonks are left running, and without obstructionism, they begin to actually try new things and solve some problems.
Granted. It turns out a lot of politicians were so obviously lying about their opinions that the people voting for them had figured out their real opinions. The lie only existed to give the voters justification in casual conversation. In fact, telling the truth makes the politician MORE powerful because of an idea of "sticking it to power".
This does not lead to truth in politics, because newsreaders are not politicians. They can simply spout propaganda on behalf of the politicians they support, and the politicians can say the technically true "I support this newscaster" statement to make the people believe the lies all over again.
What it does lead to is a lot of politicians putting on a facade of goodness to reveal their selfish intentions. Much of their facade involved voting for policies that make the world a better place, and that was why you supported them yourself. With the facade gone, they see no point in voting for anything but their own selfish interests.
With no politicians you can trust anymore, you vote for the only person on the ballot who still claims to have your interests in mind. If they're on the ballot sheet, you must be able to take them at their word, right? Politicians can't lie anymore, right?
"Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. The planet, from a human perspective, will die within most of your lifetimes. I'm just here killing time. I have no real ability to prevent the looting of your futures. The people who are profiting are so avaricious and stunted that they're not really even getting any enjoyment from the whole process. It's purely the results of their own pathology, and our system malfunctioned and put them in charge because it was never designed on purpose. It all just happened that way, and so we're all fucked." A small murmur went through the pin-drop silent press pool at the expletive.
"Me too," he continued blankly, as the silence returned. "I'm actually trying to help, but the system makes it impossible for me to produce the level of change that's required. All I'm doing is producing angst and anxiety for myself and my family. I'm simply outnumbered by, basically, millions of malfunctioning AI models in suits trying to maximize a goal number even if it destroys us all. I did my best. I tried, but I'm just as much hampered by my own personal human limits as any of you are. The system is immensely powerful, easily capable of rejecting and replacing anyone who tries to produce genuine change. Each of us in government must either work to strengthen it and be rewarded, or reject it and be cast out, or resign ourselves to working for change within its parameters and therefore accomplishing nothing of lasting value with our lives."
"I'm happy to take any questions. We've got plenty of time today, as ironic as that is to say. Anyone ...? Yes, Hodges? NBC?"
I think there's a lot of variation. I know people who have worked in politics who say the people they worked on behalf of were genuinely good people who got into it because it's a way to produce positive change in the world. I also know other people who have worked in politics who said the people they worked on behalf of were the biggest POSes on a personal level that they'd ever encountered, just absolutely like the worst people in the world, 10 times worse than you think, that made their skin crawl to even have to interact with them.
Whether the guy from my little story is 30% of the people in government or more like 1%, or 0.1%, I think people of good faith can disagree about.
People are tribal. They would still follow their favourite politician, even though they blatantly said how they feel about their constituents. People would justify it by saying the politician was speaking metaphorically, or that’s actually what they believe now. They would use religion to justify the politician’s remarks, and slowly change their own beliefs to fit with the tribe’s.
The Monkey's Paw
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