Compassion >~ Thought
John Olivier (of Last Week Tonight) has an interesting video showing how those checks automatically sent out did some active harm in some cases.
Mind you, this is after government was defunded for decades, thus offering strong “who killed hannibal” vibes.
There are multiple whole entire industries dedicated to fleecing such individuals. Health care in the USA for one… Donald Trump’s campaign to name another…
They lived in a different time period. Climate change hadn’t already happened yet, and the USA especially was sitting on top of the world, as the rest of it had been if not quite decimated then at least heavily damaged by all the bombing from WWII. And we were a socialist nation! Schools, roads, bridges, a fully functioning post office, and so much more. The top marginal tax rate was ~90% and… well anyway.
So yeah, like the Kings of Old, they accumulated “stuff”. It made sense to them at the time. Surely nothing would ever like… “change” or anything like that, would it? And they even okayed the dismantling of things like social security, and maintenance of infrastructure - so long as such did not directly impact themselves, it’s all good, right? So long as women also lose bodily autonomy, anything that went along with that is A-okay, r-r-right?!
On the bright side, do younger people have less stress, knowing that they don’t have to save up for retirement, bc they’ll surely die sooner than it would be able to keep up with anyway? Especially with inflation like we’ve seen lately?
Anyway that was quite a tangent wasn’t it? TLDR: people’s lives are so very different now, and look to remain that way permanently. And not just in the USA, but due to Brexit, in the UK too. Disinformation campaigns are strikingly effective.
Local health departments are chronically understaffed. For every 6,000 people in rural areas, there’s one public health nurse — who often works part-time, one analysis found.
“State and local public health departments are decimated resource-wise,” said Lurie, who is now an executive director at an international organization, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations. “You can’t expect them to do the job if you only resource them once there’s a crisis.”
Another explanation is a lack of urgency because the virus hasn’t severely harmed anyone in the country this year. “If hundreds of workers had died, we’d be more forceful about monitoring workers,” Chessher said. “But a handful of mild symptoms don’t warrant a heavy-handed response.”
You get what you pay for.
Wow, can you imagine having that?
A house that you could put “stuff” into?
Oof.
Do as you will but if there is a problem, we may want to actually address said problem at some point.
No bc it’s not “him”, or at least not “just” him, that is the problem. It’s like, the system, man.
The video topic overall is thus, but within that is mention of how the “massively fatal pandemic in recent memory” has affected change, in the sense of doing some harm to people on disability, and thereby pointing to how some very foundational issues need to be worked out in order to even begin to make “real change in public health funding/policy/etc”. In particular, there would need to be some stability in terms of governance. Which the end of that video actually points to quite a success story in terms of reaching that, especially illuminating how stagnation != stability, yet that can be accounted for and dealt with by lawmakers if they so choose.
The graphic was to forestall an objection as to why “bUt MuH gOvErNmEnT” is non-functional: it is non-functional b/c it was literally designed to be that way. Two examples that readily spring to mind are how the post office used to deliver mail in 3 days time, while now it can be weeks if your letter ever arrives at the destination at all, and how horrific taxes are to have to be filled out and filed - despite how the government mostly seems to know how much you owe regardless - due to heavy lobbying by the tax preparation software industry.