• 4 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: September 23rd, 2023

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  • 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.


  • Reba McEntire! Love me some Reba
    Alabama are another favorite of mine

    Mary Chapin Carpenter is great too
    The Judds
    Loretta Lynn
    Hank Williams Sr.
    Kenny Rogers
    Rosanne Cash
    Waylon & Willie, baby (Waylon Jennings & Willie Nelson)
    Brooks & Dunn
    Charlie Daniels Band

    In a more modern iteration, I’ve been really enjoying The Dead South recently




  • I’m one of these patients. I was successfully treated for an autoimmune brain condition of some sort. To this day, none of our clinical testing has ever showed any abnormality. I was treated based on detailed medical history and my insistence that my self-reported symptoms be taken seriously.

    It took months to find a physician willing to treat me, and I still to this day don’t understand what they were so afraid of. My self-reports of symptoms, patterns of exacerbations, and positive response to corticosteroids were consistent and unequivocal.

    I was in nursing school at the time, and I don’t know if that helped or hindered me. But I finally figured out how to speak the language that my physicians could understand, even though I was the patient. That shouldn’t be necessary.




  • This was very much my experience with the trans girl I grew up with 35 years ago. From the instant she was able to express preferences (I’m talking like age 18 months to 2 years), it was all princesses and dolls and makeup and trying on mom’s high heels. We all just assumed she was a gay boy because we had never heard of a transgender person before.

    We encouraged her to just keep that behavior at home because she was bullied mercilessly for appearing to be an effeminate boy. But nothing would stop her; she was completely irrepressible.

    When in high school, she told us she was really a girl, it was like the most face-palmingly obvious thing. Of COURSE that’s what we’d been seeing her entire life. It just made sense. That’s just who she is.