The onshore tax havens Delaware, Wyoming, and Nevada are vastly worse in scope than any offshore country. They push the narrative about those “terrible foreign countries” to distract us from this fact.
The problem is US tax code, not offshore financial centers.
To me, it’s all about rational return on investment providing economic incentives to achieve what we want to achieve.
My favorite example to explain what I mean is my own personal health insurance. I have a chronic medical condition that requires constant medication, frequent visits to specialists, and expensive medical tests and procedures. There is simply zero chance that I will ever pay enough in a monthly premium to cover what I cost. Meaning I am always a net financial loss for a private, for-profit insurance company.
This gives a private company every incentive in the world to obstruct and deny my care in hopes that I’ll get frustrated and give up, or maybe even die and get off their books forever.
The government, on the other hand, has a positive financial incentive to keep me healthy. If I am healthy, I am working, paying taxes, buying goods and services that contribute to the economy, and hopefully contributing something beneficial to my community. Only the government (acting as a proxy for “society”) naturally profits from insuring my healthcare.
This is why I believe we should have fully socialized medical care. Because there are some specific things that only the government has natural positive economic incentives that align with what is beneficial for the general public.
Whatever those things are, they should be socialized. And generally those things are basic life sustaining things like food, housing, medicine, education, utilities.
I’m fine with privatized capitalism in a very restricted, heavily regulated niche form. But all the basic necessities should be socialized.
I completely disagree with the sentiment here. My 40s have been great because they marked the point in my life when I finally lost my last fuck to give.
The freedom that provides is worth not being able to drink the way I used to in my 30s. Enjoy that achievement.
Also, why isn’t there a slide cover to physically cover the camera, and why can’t I turn off the mic and camera separately? So I just use one of those black foam stickers to cover the camera.
The first was an exchange student from Ecuador who attended my high school. She actually cried. The other time she told me she cried was when she started dreaming in English instead of Spanish.
The second was a girl I knew in college who had moved up from Florida to attend Ohio State. The first snow that year was that dry snow that blows around, but there was enough of it that everything was covered.
Walking back to our dorm, she kept gathering up handfuls, trying to make a snowball, and she asked if we could make a snowman. We told her it wouldn’t work because this is not snowman snow, and she was mystified. “There’s snowman snow??”
First time we had that good, heavy, wet, sticky snow, we took her out and made a 7-foot-tall snowman haha
Practical Engineering - in depth presentations of civil engineering feats, concepts, problems, solutions
Joe Scott - just simple, entertaining discussions of interesting topics
Philosophy Tube - longer format, intensely well-cited presentations on philosophy related to current events (with theatrical costumes!)
Ryan Hall - who knew that a weather forecast could be so fun? Regularly updated weather forecasts for the entire United States with detailed coverage and livestreams of events like tornado outbreaks, hurricanes, and large snowstorms. With charity drives to provide supplies to people on the ground
PBS Spacetime, PBS Eons, all the PBS channels really
Plainly Difficult - consistent quality, often hilarious presentations of various disasters. I particularly like his entire series on radiological accidents, often involving lost radioactive sources that random members of the public stumble onto, which is terrifying.
All of the Apollo missions, actually, including 13. In fact, Apollo 13 marks the farthest distance human beings have ever been from Earth because of the modified trajectory they had to use in order to get back to Earth faster with their damaged spacecraft.
But Apollo 13 also is the only moon mission where there was never a single individual alone in the ship when it went dark behind the moon. (On all other missions, the Command Module Pilot remained in the ship while the other two landed on the surface, so for the duration of that time, they were doing solo orbits that took them through the silent shadow of the moon.