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rational_lib

@ rational_lib @lemmy.world

Posts
6
Comments
450
Joined
1 yr. ago

  • UnitedHealth overcharged cancer patients for drugs by over 1k%

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  • UnitedHealth, employer of slain exec Brian Thompson

    Not quite correct sort of. This is OptumRx, which is owned by United Health Group, which also owns United Health Care, which Brian Thompson was nominally the CEO of. In other words, this is like the sibling of the company Brian Thompson ran.

    To be clear, Brian Thmpson wasn't a billionaire, he was a mid-level at best millionaire worth only $41 million. He was just another star-bellied prole who thought he was in the aristocracy.

    Point being, the whole thing is stupid. The health care system, the people getting rich off it, Luigi's reaction to it, our reactions to it, the media's reporting on it, all of it.

  • Behold, the peak of Twitter (formerly renamed to X)

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  • Really it's the celebrities more than others keeping it afloat. What's really inexcusable is that so many Democratic politicians still have accounts - AOC, Bernie, the whole gang is still there helping Elon and Saudi billionaires get richer poor more slowly.

  • They're been quiet for seventy days now.

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  • The best solution to the two parties excluding the left isn't a third party, it's for the left to register as Republicans and conduct a hostile takeover of the GOP in the primaries.

    This can easily succeed in blue states/cities to start out.

  • Why one of Europe's largest pension funds sold its entire $585 million stake in Tesla

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  • It's not necessarily political, wall street can be very clueless about technology. They all seem to believe they can judge the potential of just about any company, no matter how complex the industry, by merely watching a video of the CEO speaking and judging how smart they sound. Perceived potential can also be self-reinforcing because the more prominent a business figure gets, the more wall street reporters and influencers want to be associated with them - so they're careful to only praise them and not piss them off. So they can easily be duped by an Elizabeth Holmes/Adam Neumann type who has a strong voice and even stronger connections and promises the moon for a small investment.

    Musk's key innovation was taking that a step further and promising them Mars.

  • Meta Risks Mass Exodus: Is #HelloQuitMeta the Next Viral Movement?

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  • At first, the internet was for nerds only and not "for the masses". Then corporations realized there was a lot of money to be made, and they forced user-friendliness on it. And then the masses came.

    Don't worry, in two decades we'll have Fediverse 3.0 which will just be a balkanized assortment of sites that don't communicate with each other and are worth trillions, all owned by people who bafflingly support President Kid Rock.

  • Joe Rogan Nods Along As Mel Gibson Claims His Friends Were Cured of Stage 4 Cancer By by ivermectin, fenbendazole (another animal dewormer), and methylene blue (a fabric dye)

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  • I’m sorry, but fuck free speech as so many people are raving about. Its the worst thing that has happened to the world since the Internet came on.

    I think the mistake isn't free speech but not having enough exceptions for fraudulent statements. For example, if you say anything false and damaging about a specific person, everyone agrees that's libel and not "free speech". But if you say something false and damaging about a group of people, like trans people or immigrants, that's "free speech" and perfectly legal. Or if you say something false and damaging about fake cures, etc.

    It's actually a tough problem because we can't expect everyone to just be perfectly right all the time. But I think that for people like Rogan who have a wide platform, there should be some liability for lying about things that actually harm others. The fact that this is effectively legal is why psychopaths are dominating media narratives right now.

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  • You can look at what happens when you actually go Luigi by looking at what happened with Luigi. They're the ones with the real guns and thanks to advertising dollars and social media ownership, control over the media narrative. Violence is the excuse they need to crack down.

    But they can't make us keep paying them.

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  • You think you're tipping the worker, you're actually tipping Jack Dorsey.

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  • I think at some point we need to agree as a society on a no-tipping day in which we stop paying tips, and just keep it up. After that point, no tipping for anything, and rather than not tipping being a stigma, tipping becomes a stigma.

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  • Honestly the fact that 75% of Democrats voted against it is actually kinda surprising. In the past close to 100% of both parties were knee-jerk pro-Israel votes. This means there's actually a good chance it won't pass the senate. If people wanna call their senator instead of complaining online, maybe it won't. I'm in DC so I'm allowed to just complain online until you give me my two senators.

  • It’s a trap and we’re falling for it again

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  • I think it's a bit more complicated than that. Take for example the fact that Trump made large gains among both Jews and Muslims in 2024. My explanation is that the war made both groups feel like Biden wasn't biased towards their side enough, so they went to Trump.

    People don't vote for positions, they vote for emotions. If they're angry, they vote to show their anger. And how does one show anger? By doing something irrational, like if you're angry and you punch a wall, only hurting yourself. The American people were angry, and they expressed their anger with the voting equivalent of punching a wall and hurting themselves - voting Trump.

  • It’s a trap and we’re falling for it again

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  • If Biden said what Trump is saying about Greenland, everyone would assume his dementia's gotten so bad he's gotta be removed from office even before the inauguration. But Trump does it, and everyone treats it as a serious thing that could happen. The reason is, Trump is so dumb if he has severe dementia, there's no way of knowing. I mean that seriously, that is the actual reason he gets a free pass on dementia.

  • A man in Moscow buys a newspaper...

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  • Still can't beat Saddam though.

  • But "socialism" is a scary word

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  • Trump seeks to block 'imminent' release of special counsel Jack Smith's report

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  • So if you're Trump you get to steal and disclose top secret documents with impunity. But if you're disclosing information about Trump's wrongdoing, it's illegal even if it's non secret info in the public interest.

    Makes me wonder what would have if Trump disclosed top secret info about his own wrong doing? Would we get a perpetual motion machine powered by Trump going in and out of prison?

  • If I had a nickel for every time someone says "this person's being a huge jerk to me but I think they might be neurodivergent"

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  • When they ramble on about something you don't care about or actively don't want to discuss, say "Hey I don't like this conversation, can we talk about something else?"

    Yellow: "Oh sorry, I didn't mean to make you uncomfortable."Red: "What? Why don't you wanna talk about this, is it because you secretly hate me or are hiding something? Now I know we need to talk about it until I'm convinced you're hearing what I have to say on this topic."

  • ‘The American people did not vote for whatever the hell this is,’ warns House Democrat

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  • I don't blame Harris but I do blame Biden. Biden should never have run in 2020 and certainly not in 2024. He was a failed presidential candidate in 2008 and earlier, but he used his association with Obama to win despite being a terrible candidate. His ego almost got Trump a second term in 2020 and ended up getting us a Trump term in 2024. Trump is not a good candidate, he's not supposed to win. He only won and came close because he had the incredible good fortune of running against Hillary Clinton once and Biden twice.

  • Californians Say X Blocked Them From Viewing Amber Alert About Missing 14-Year-Old

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  • This has been annoying me as well, so many city services got used to just using twitter and then Elon took over and now you just can't find out about things unless you have an X account. Shortly after the change to X I drove hours to use a hiking trail that was closed - I checked the conditions on the park service's website, but it was using a twitter feed and the top post was "trail is open, come on in!" because it had been changed to show the top post of all time instead of the newest post.

    There should be some non-profit funded by cities that's basically just a webpage where cities can post important info, or maybe they can have their own mastodon node.

  • Stephen Miller’s legal group tells officials they could end up in prison over sanctuary policies

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  • Well that's infuriating. So these people wanna lock up our elected representatives, then complain when we don't wanna serve them at restaurants.