Universal / National Health Care Insurance

Nobody’s ever allowed to change their mind or change their views because of personal experiences. Get the fuck out of here with that crap.

The more obnoxious and self-righteous one is in an opinion, it's only fair to expect to be called out when that opinion changes...especially if it changes as a result of personal impact.

False.

Also false.

Collaterally destroying the child's future, making them a burden on society they needn't be and playing merry hell with all our futures.

I wonder if UA has changed his tune on emissions limiting vehicles.

Do I need millionaire celebrities and politicians showing up in private jets and limousines to lecture me about my carbon footprint? No.

Will I travel by recycled hemp fiber golf cart while Alexandria Ocasio Cortez flies first class? Also no.

Hypocrites do not get to dictate terms to me.

Nor will I look at emissions and mpg to the exclusion of everything else. The impact of mining exotic metals for giant car batteries, for example. Or the waste of buying a brand new disposable econobox every few years. Or charging your batteries with coal power.

A worthy LEV will be affordable, easy for the consumer to maintain, and last at LEAST 10 years. I consider that lenient. It will also not compromise in any way on the functionality of the vehicle it is meant to replace. You will not be selling me punitive sacrifice at a premium just so I can show off what a virtuous person I am.

I bought my Leaf when it was 4 years old. At 6 years it still has 85% battery capacity. It costs me nothing to charge it (charge at work, ok it's a benefit) and has required no maintenance. I've put 25,000 miles on it in two years.

Paid $9000 for it.

It's comfortable, fast, quiet. it cools and heats the cabin faster than a gas car. It's nice never going to the gas station, so yes, it's convenient. Yeah it only has a 70 mile range now, but my daily drive is 40 miles.

The impact of mining exotic metals is a hell of a lot less than the impact of drilling, fracking, refining oil over the life of the car. This breaks even at about the 1 year mark, but this assumes much of the energy used building the car came from fossil fuel.

GA gets 10% of its power from renewables, 25% (soon to be double that) from nuclear. I charge at work which gets a lot of its power from solar on the roof of the parking deck.

laughing my fucking ass off. Like the big three are going to just let that happen.

Easy for the consumer to maintain hasn't been true even of petrol cars for some time - minor stuff like oil and brake fluid, sure. Bodywork perhaps. But most engines need a CPU diagnostic these days. You can't even do a software update yourself as the CPU is wired only to accept licenced engineers.

It's already happening. A cultural shift is underway and the "big three" can either ride the wave or be swept into irrelevance. GM and Ford already have EVs and are pursuing the technology. Tesla is pushing hard and Elon has enough on the ball that he's doing the Apple model, seeing EVs from tooth to tail, working on everything from vehicles to batteries to charging station networks.

And yet, none of that reaches UA's provisions.

This is why I hang onto my 25 year old jeep.

Sissy. Most cars today don't need diagnostics unless the check engine light comes on. Then you read the code and replace the part. A code update would only be done by the dealer and only if there's a bug that needs updating. If you want your own "tune" that's from a 3rd party company and involves buying their software and flashing it, voiding warranties and emissions while you're at it. It's hella more easy than feeler gauges and dwell meters. And a 25 year old jeep (96?) has all the electronics a 2021 jeep has. 'cept for bluetooth and such, and maybe a drive-by-wire throttle.

See chevy bolt. See ford f150 lightning.

I’m not unsympathetic to the fairness argument for nationalized health insurance, or at least a public option. I am very skeptical that costs would actually come down, at least without massive service cuts and rationing of the sort that the UK had ca. 1980-2005. See: https://randomcriticalanalysis.com/...-one-million-charts-a-response-to-noah-smith/ (warning: extreme stats and math).

It's particularly interesting how expenditures/person are basically constant within each country, regardless of income.

Can you give the TL;DR of that link? What's they key takeaway? The USA really doesn't spend an inordinate amount of money on health care when you factor in all the right factors?

Or did I miss the boat on that one?

We wouldn't have an NHS. It would be national insurance, like France and Germany. Got any stats for those?

Last I checked, reproduction is instinctive, and not having children is a choice.

Do you actually expect undereducated and miseducated to make reasonable choices when engaging in instinctive behaviors?

I expect to not face consequences for other peoples' choices.

There are a whole bunch of points in that article, but the relevant bits are varied statistical evidence that GDP is a poor measure for determining if the money spent on health care is inordinate in the first place, and if you use better measures, the disproportionality (as compared to other countries) goes away. A fair bit of the rest is spent on digging into where the additional money actually goes (TLDR: mostly workforce size, volume of high-intensity diagnostics & treatments, and new drugs which don't make it to other countries until their patents here are halfway or fully expired).

The implications are that government-run health insurance probably won't affect either total cost or health outcomes but very marginally, except possibly below benefits cliffs (might be in another post), the largest of which is for single parents making between $29000 and $69000. We're still going to be fatter and die younger, because we consume a lot more because we have more disposable income.

The link (and its links) has stats on all the countries in the OECD (and occasionally beyond).

Tough. You pay higher taxes because Google won't. But I don't see you ragging on them, just the poor.

Why is that?

Have you been suckered into thinking you might be a millionaire tax-avoider too one day?

Or is it just easier to punch down because you don't like to admit you had a bit of luck (or at least, no bad luck) in your life and obviously anyone below you just "made poor choices"?

Because fuck you, that's why.

Done with the whole "Supply a laundry list of objections with every sentence, to prove your consistency" schtick.

No, that's just the boilerplate meme people like you use to signal you have nothing new to say.

You don't know a goddamn thing about me and my "luck." You're making the assumptions that suit you.

Start a thread about Silicon Valley if you like.

There isn't a fucking thing that happens in a society that doesn't have consequences for you.

Like a hundred different tangents there, when I was just wondering if in principle you agreed with emissions limits for vehicles, to minimise an individual's impact and cost to others.

Yep. Like you do about folk and their "crotch fruit".

My assumption is people deserve a chance. Yours is kick 'em in the fucking head while they're on the floor.

And yet you expect children to suffer for their parents’ choices.

So very not hypocritical of you.

Then you're a naive fool.

People impact on each other in a society. It's unavoidable.

The whole reason we have things like public education is because we learned that ignoring issues doesn't make them a burden, it just delays dealing with them until the impact is much worse.

If you really care about reducing the consequences on you for other people's choices then the best way is to look at evidence and studies of what approaches lead to that end result.

Your proposed solution is akin to ignoring something in the hope it will go away, rarely a solid long term strategy.

I like my version better.

Nope. Ignoring all the in-car entertainment systems, since about '07 or so, cars all have aircraft-style black boxes installed so that the dealers and manufacturers can get more information about real-world use of the cars, and things like what happens in an accident. While they swear that they would never, ever, use that data to shaft you on a warranty repair on something like your headlights because you drove 1 MPH above the recommended speed during the break-in period for the car, I'm not so trusting. Additionally, they all have an onboard GPS system that can communicate with the dealer/manufacturer so long as the car has a cell signal. You might remember the story of the 50-year-old teacher who ran away with a 15-year-old student. He was able to evade the police for 38 days because he disabled the GPS system in his car, so they couldn't track his location. There was a case a couple of years ago where a group of teens murdered a guy and stole his car. The police were able to capture them because they contacted the dealer and had them give the police the GPS information from the car. There have been efforts, and I don't know if they've been successful, to mandate remote kill switches in cars, so that if someone is running from the police, the cops can disable the vehicle. Most, if not all, new/used car dealers install a device that allows them to remotely prevent a vehicle from starting so that if someone misses too many payments, they can't drive the car. Generally what they do is kill the car, give you some time to come make a payment so they'll turn the car back on, and if you don't do that within a certain period of time, then they'll send the repo guy out to get your car.

So, yeah, I don't blame UA for wanting to drive an older vehicle. Another thing that I'll add is that a guy hit some road debris with his Tesla and Tesla wanted $16K to repair the car. He found a shop that would fix the car for only $700, but it's unclear if the repair is sufficient, or what impact this will have on his warranty.