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Joined 24 days ago
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Cake day: January 30th, 2025

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  • I don’t doubt they do for Healthcare but for the billing system I dont think they are. They aren’t going to your employer and saying Steve is fat so we’re charging an extra $200 for him, but you can pass that on to him so the rest of your employees don’t have to pay. In the end when they go to charge you and your employer they’ll just give you the total rate to cover x people and then split it up by person.

    Correct me if I’m wrong but the administrative overhead and health privacy implications would be too much to assess individual health cost liability.

    Yeah they’re going to keep track of every visit and procedure to make sure you aren’t “overusing” your coverage and deny you if you do, but passing that un aggregated data over to the actuarys seems infeasible.


  • This argument is so dumb. It’s quite often paired with " I don’t want to pay for fat people’s and smokers poor life choices", like do you think united Healthcare doesn’t cover the third of the population that’s obese, or is even making them pay more? Unless you’re one of the few people getting Healthcare from the marketplace your insurance provider doesn’t have enough info to assess health risk and adjust prices, you’re employer buys a bulk plan and you become a line in a database with maybe your age on it but not much else. You and your employer are paying the same amount whether your a marathon runner or a chain smoking alcoholic.




  • Russian propaganda, wtf. Newsflash Russia has good relations with Israel, not as subservient as the u.s., but they aren’t really complaining about the genocide. I guess you just think that anything that’s against the democrats is Russian propaganda, in which case I’d say your a good tool for democrat propaganda.

    Made an edit since you people can’t seem to take a short reply but I’ll copy it here:

    I try show some brevity once instead of writing paragraphs and get told I don’t know my history, so here’s some paragraphs.

    Yes Israel has been carrying out a process of slow ethnic cleansing for decades. Biden while in congress along with all the other dems repeatedly backed arms sales to this apartheid state knowing it was going to kill Palestinians. The violence ramped up in 2023 as Israeli settlers committed pogroms against Palestinians, which is part of the reason hamas did oct 7th. During this time Biden did nothing to reign in the Israelis, and instead tried to throw it under the rug to get a deal with the Saudis to normalize relations. Then Oct 7th happened and Israel went on a full onslaught against Gaza, and to a lesser extent the west bank and Lebanon. Biden again did nothing to stop this and continued to give military aid and diplomatic support to Israel. By the end of his administration Gaza was uninhabitable. Now trump seems primed to allow Israel to finish what it started and complete the ethnic cleansing.




  • Still here, Joe Biden started the genocide, trump looks like he’s going to finish it.

    Not sure if the liberals are much louder in condemning this, judging by the comments here they seem to just want to say “I told you so”

    EDIT: I try show some brevity once instead of writing paragraphs and get told I don’t know my history, so here’s some paragraphs.

    Yes Israel has been carrying out a process of slow ethnic cleansing for decades. Biden while in congress along with all the other dems repeatedly backed arms sales to this apartheid state knowing it was going to kill Palestinians. The violence ramped up in 2023 as Israeli settlers committed pogroms against Palestinians, which is part of the reason hamas did oct 7th. During this time Biden did nothing to reign in the Israelis, and instead tried to throw it under the rug to get a deal with the Saudis to normalize relations. Then Oct 7th happened and Israel went on a full onslaught against Gaza, and to a lesser extent the west bank and Lebanon. Biden again did nothing to stop this and continued to give military aid and diplomatic support to Israel. By the end of his administration Gaza was uninhabitable. Now trump seems primed to allow Israel to finish what it started and complete the ethnic cleansing.


  • Eh, not really, ags sue companies all the time for not acting in there shareholders interests. It’s usually more along the lines of the CEO giving a contract to his buddy that costs the company more, but any time a public for profit company pursues some interest other than maximizing shareholder value they open themselves up for a lawsuit. It could be a purely nepotistic or self dealing interest, or it could be your interest in justice, if it’s not about making money and you didn’t disclose to the shareholders that your decision is not about making money you have defrauded them who are invested solely to make money.

    It’s a reading of the fiduciary duty of loyalty that most companies and courts have come to accept, if you knowingly do something to decrease shareholder value for some personal interest than you can be sued for it. This is the reason public benefit companies exist, so you can pursue noble causes like dei or fighting climate change that may reduce profits, without risking a lawsuit.

    This can be used for good such as in the case of the 2021 McDonald’s shareholder lawsuit that alleged it’s failure to address rampant sexual harassment caused a loss of reputation and shareholder value. Ironically as a result it implemented a DEI program to address the problems…

    The problem with the lawsuit is that they have to prove the dei stuff was about some ideology of the board and not about making money. Which will be hard to prove because at the time forecasts probably would’ve showed that embracing dei would increase profits. Even today they probably made more money off the rainbow merch then they lost.



  • Public for profit companies have a fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder value. When you issue shares of a company you are signing a contract to put the companies needs over anything else when administering the company.

    If it just worked off proportional representation like you imagine then the majority shareholder could unilaterally sell the company off to themselves for pennies or do self dealing to enrich themselves at the companies expense. No one would ever invest in a company because they could never be sure their interests would be met unless they had a controlling stake.

    Companies need a goal in order to judge the administration by and to be able to call foul if they stray from that goal to pursue personal interests. For most public companies that is profit, and if you stray from that goal for your own personal interests, even if it’s a noble one like preventing climate change, the other shareholders can sue you for that. They didn’t sign up for your personal moral ambitions, they signed up to make money and they have a contract that says so.

    If you want to pursue things other than profit you can register as a public benefit corporation which can consider things like climate change in there decision making process without risking a lawsuit from shareholders. This changes the agreement between the shareholder and the company so the shareholder knows that they aren’t going to make the most money at all costs. None of the major oil companies are registered that way though.

    Read up on the duty of loyalty here before calling bs and thinking you can change big oil from within



  • Owning a stock keeps the price high though as you’re restricting supply, and it looks like his trust has also bought more shares so it’s increasing the demand as well.

    A high stock price doesn’t fund the industry directly, unless it’s a smaller company that’s still issuing stock which he also seems to be invested in a lot of those. It does increase the power of the industry though. If a lot of people divested from fossil fuels that would lower the value of the stock and the net worth of the principal owners. Those principal owners are currently using their money to bribe politicians into ignoring the climate crisis and to increase fossil fuel extraction. If they had less money to do that, then it’d be a lot easier to pass legislation to address climate change.

    He also seems to be buying bonds in the industry as well which is more directly funding the industry. Also, a high stock price allows the companies to get more bonds at a cheaper rate, so that also helps to fund the industry.

    All of this is also missing the main point of the article in that bill gates is profiting from the fossil fuel industry and has a stake in seeing it continue, while pretending he’s a champion for climate change.



  • America doesn’t work like that. Due to the way the electoral system is set up only two parties can be viable at any given time. The only time you can create a new party is in a realignment, eg. When Lincoln formed the republican party as an explicitly anti slavery northern party and the democrats became the pro slavery southern party. Prior to that it was the whigs and the democrats, which were aligned around issues other than slavery.

    So unless the progressives can force a realignment along some new issue and subsume a major party, creating another party would just be handing a lot of elections over to the Republicans.

    This is why lemmy was so vehemently against Jill stein and the greens even though most people on here agree with her politics more than kamala, because they saw her as sabotaging the democrats chances and handing the election to trump.


  • They never really wanted gaza, it’s a small piece of land with little historical ties to the bible/Torah. In fact it has more ties to the philistines (non jewish inhabitants of the area), yes that’s where the word Palestine comes from, who were there historical enemy.

    There long term goal pre October 7th was to try and move all the Palestinians in the rest of Israel into Gaza. You could see this with there funnel immigration policy, if you left Israel for east Jerusalem you couldn’t come back to israel, if you left east Jerusalem for the west bank you couldn’t come back to Jerusalem, if you left the west bank for Gaza you couldn’t come back to the west bank.

    The problem with this plan, besides the ethics of doing a slow ethnic cleansing, was that if you concentrate that many people in an open air prison it tends to radicalize them against the wardens. So they had to deal with constant missile fire, they thought Iron dome would solve this but Oct 7th removed that image of safety.

    So now they need a new plan. They can’t force them out as no country will take them. They can’t occupy it long term because it just becomes a pit to throw Israeli soldiers in, that’s why they left in 2005. So trump volunteering to take it off there hands is the perfect solution, the u.s. can pay the money and lives in a quagmire while the Israelis can “live in peace”



  • It should be sold by the government then. Similar to how government handles the lottery, if they didn’t then some organized criminals would do it instead. They can control the stores and the packaging so it doesnt seem fun and cool and is just dosage information and a bunch of health facts and treatment plans. They can then direct the revenues to treatment and education.

    If you just decriminalize consumption without legalizing some way to buy it then the black market and a lot of the problems with the war on drugs continue: crime, violence, lack of regulation etc.

    I don’t have much faith in us handling it this way though considering the way we just effectively legalized gambling and now the most predatory companies are flooding addicts with advertisements to get them to gamble more.