• 1 Post
  • 141 Comments
Joined 4 years ago
cake
Cake day: December 30th, 2021

help-circle




  • Look, if you want to argue with me that the US healthcare system is broken, you’ll get no argument from me.

    The US government spends more public money per person than Canada, and yet most people in the United States need to pay for entirely Private health insurance. It’s a fantastic example of the brokenness of the US system. For the amount of money being fought for in the US healthcare system, there should be one of the world’s best single-payer options.

    And you can’t even get partisan on it because the current system was put into place by supermajority democrats. Most people forget that.

    But that’s the problem. When you’re dealing with a corrupt government, it doesn’t really matter what nice ideas are on the table. They take your money or the money from your great-grandkids, and they hand it to their buddies, you ain’t in the club.

    And that goes for healthcare, that goes for green energy, it goes for whatever you’ve got.

    All you’re seeing here is a changing of the guard where money stops being sent to one set of rich people who probably could have afforded to do something on their own so that it can be sent to another set of rich people who probably could have afforded to do something on their own.








  • I feel like a lot of people don’t understand that you can’t consume your way to using less.

    #1 is “reduce” because if you just use less, then you don’t need to mine anything more, or farm anything more, or build anything more. Ideally, if you care about the environment that’s the most direct way to improve things.

    That isn’t to say that we don’t need to build out greener infrastructure. What it does mean is that anytime that we are doing industrial scale manufacturing like this, we have to be very careful because it’s going to inherently damage the environment, and if you’re going to do that you need to do the math to figure out if you’re doing something that’s net good.

    I think a lot of people aren’t there yet, they just assume that you do the thing that’s good and you’re doing good without regard for the cost.


  • I can actually see this for most solar panels. A few of them are going to fail catastrophically, but if it’s a giant piece of silicon, of course it’s basically going to be fine.

    I’m responsible for a device that is installed in 1996, and people have said that I should replace the solar panel but I don’t see why I would – it’s been producing a small amount of power non-stop for every summer, why would I want to replace something that is doing exactly what I needed to? You’re just producing waste that is still fully functional. As a society we do that way too much as it is.







  • China still burns more coal every year than every single other country on earth put together.

    This matters a lot, because it doesn’t matter that you’re “using electricity” if it’s coming from a big ol’ coal pollution factory.

    In some ways, it’s preferable to directly use the coal in some applications – changing from chemical energy to thermal to movement to electricity back to thermal energy can be less efficient than just changing the chemical energy to thermal energy and using that directly.