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Joined 19 hours ago
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Cake day: December 11th, 2024

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  • All the rule does is enshrine a “legitimate” profit margin for insurers.

    Ding ding ding.

    It’s almost as if the ACA was an insider bill that was accepted by the entire industry because it allowed them to reset the economics of the business without one insurer feeling like they were taking a loss.

    The vast majority of the ACA is literally about risk portfolio balancing between private companies.

    The regulations on profit essentially changed the game and is why most insurance companies are now vertically integrated with pharmacies, concierge medicine, or even entire medical systems. It’s the only way you can charge more for insurance without having to rebate out is by capturing your own payouts which allows you to keep MLR.

    • Year 1: You pay $100 for insurance and insurance pays $80 for your meds to the insurance company pharmacy.
    • Year 2: You pay $105 for insurance and insurance pays $84 for your meds to the insurance company pharmacy.

    Creative accounting. That’s why every insurance company makes special pharamcy benefits rules for the in house pharmacy and spams you with “switch your prescription to Optum RX”


  • Of course, the people living there know best what they need, and with their current setups they mostly need wood for their stoves, or fuel for their generators, which are running electric heaters. But not all of them have stoves or generators.

    So Generator -> Electric Heater is incredibly inefficient. People are likely doing this because it’s all they have and they want to charge their electronics. If you want to provide equipment I would suggest:

    This will allow them to connect to a standard propane tank. This setup is incredibly cheap to maintain esp. if they have access to a Amerigas/Rhino propane exchange or propane fill-up station. The buy-in here is around $140 per tent but you can get it down cheaper if you get a generic hose. The maintenance cost of exchanging/refilling the propane. On the 4000 BTU burn, this can last about half a month with a standard 20lb propane tank and should be more than enough to heat a tent. Monthly this has a cost of about $40 depending on how much propane is locally. Since the heater is radiant it’s heating the person / objects in the tent not the air meaning it’s incredibly effective.

    This setup is really beneficial because it’s easy to adapt to different living circumstances whether you’re in a tent, a car, etc. In a pinch it can keep you comfortable enough in a single-wide too.

    If you guys want to build something, reducing fuel costs during the day can be achieved by building a solar collector



  • Copying another comment from elsewhere:

    Nobody who is doing critical support for Putin is saying “America should be ruled like Russia”.

    The groups you mention in their political context do not have alternatives that exhibit the following traits:

    1. The strength to defend against imperialism to the same degree
    2. Socialist politics

    Political context matters.

    Yes there are different standards for the imperial core than there are for the periphery. The imperial core should be held to a higher standard because it is the source of woe that it sows across the periphery.









  • It is that, a shitposting site, but it is also more than that. There are many of us here who, for better or worse, spend a lot of time and energy on this site. We care about the community that makes it up and we care about the direction it’s headed.

    This is your actual argument. This all boils down to a “No Exit” argument. You are mad that the mods are “the look” in the Camus sense. You want the mods to recognize the subjectivity in your person, rather than seeing you as an objective collection of posts. That is an unrealistic demand for an online site. Given the history of philosophy and general human history it’s a bit of an unrealistic demand on real-life people too.

    Time is a limited resource, at the end of the day your only real option in any community is to care about the community in an egoless way otherwise you’ll only feel burned and be jaded.


  • Yeah eventually, and I really mean “eventually”.

    One of the main things that turned me from an MLM to an ancomm is that we tend to read the inevitability of the JDPON in the same way that Darwinian Liberals read “survival of the fittest”. Inevitable doesn’t mean easy, pain free, nice, straightforward, optimal or enjoyable. Just like “survival of the fittest” doesn’t mean any of those things either. The niceties are superimposed by our minds because of the flowery language surrounding the idea. The technicals are where the brutal difficulty of the task (whether survival or enacting JDPON) tend to reside. Our inevitability in practice also caps at the point where life is no longer sustainable on this planet. There’s a lot to learn from ML/M but the context under which those revolutions were won and the contexts in which they’ve been betrayed in are all expired and are not our context. Ancomm as an ideology is a study in the general problem.

    A lot of Americans substitute the “just vote” that the liberal class mollifies them with, with an emotional adoration of violence mainly based on the individual gratification and catharsis of “being right”. This isn’t the recipe for revolution (in any realistic leftist sense), it’s the recipe for revanchism. It’s quite literally, as Mr. 1984 says, the future of humanity is a boot stomping on a human face over and over again forever. The paragraph preceding that quote isn’t about evil scifi ultra totalitarianism, it’s about a simple recipe for never ending emotional revanchism.




  • It’s actually incredibly strange because this is quite literally the easiest country in the world to dome someone important in, our firearms laws are part of our neocolonialism scheme that we force on our neighbors (Mexico).

    Americans have all the means to do this, they simply do not because the control scheme is too powerful. It ultimately doesn’t matter what leftist framework you take broadly whether it’s anarchism or ML. A successful strategy looks roughly the same and its ideological underpinnings are roughly the same.

    At the end of the day the position is quite literally to wage a war the rest is just tactics.