As somebody who has by now lived in 2 countries with Universal Healthcare I can answer that:

• It’s for people who want faster access to non-emergency medical treatment than the public system will provide.

So if you want to not to have to wait months for specialist appointments and surgery and you can afford it, you get Healthcare Insurance. This even more so for aesthetic and run of the mill dental treatment - the Public isn’t going to, for example, just put you in front of the queue to give you an implant unless it’s deemed necessary because of your health, so if your concern is about your appearance you’ll have to wait years or it won’t even be covered.

Mind you, the whole thing is still backed by the Public Healthcare System: if during a surgery at a private hospital you have massive complications they’ll generally transfer you to a Public Hospital.

Further, even in the Private everything is way cheaper because of the massive competition from the Public System, plus the Public even uses its leverage to keep the prices of more common medicine low (basically since most of the prescriptions are done by doctors in the Public System, for things were there are multiple options the most expensive stuff doesn’t get prescribed unless it offers enough benefit versus the cheaper options to justify it, so for example things like Insulin are way cheaper if you get it without a prescription from a Public System doctor and free or near free if you do because the State pays most or all of the price)

Anyways, the single biggest benefit of Universal Healthcare which the “free market is the best” (in this case it isn’t: in general the free market optimizes for profit, not for outcomes, and further, in this domain people will pay whatever it takes to survive and don’t actually have the expertise to judge the quality of treatment and know the availability of other options, so there is no natural free market here) crowd forgets is the peace of mind and freedom Universal Healthcare gives:

• if you lose your job, you’re still fine even if you have and accident or get sick
• if you want to change jobs you have total freedom as you won’t be without Healthcare for you and your family in the period between jobs
• if you need or want to stop working on a regular jobs (because you want to start your own company or want to take a sabatical or want to go back to school and get a degree) you can without losing your Healthcare coverage during that period and it’s going to be way cheaper than if you had to pay Health Insurance (and copays) during that time.

Private Healthcare Systems are very much prisons that keep people tied to traditional jobs,

Trauma my ass.

Literally only a handful of people alive today in Israel experienced the Holocaust and most aren’t even descendents Western European Jews: their parents and grandparents came from Russia (especially people from the Settler Movement).

Nah, this is the same kind of thieving and murdering white colonialism as in the US back when their were genociding the Native Tribes, Appartheid South Africa and the worst of the White occupiers in Africa (such as Belgium in Congo) - as can be seen by the way the Zionists treat Ethiopian Jews - which just happens to be associated with an unusual overwhelmingly white religion other than the usual overwhelmingly White religion.

These people have the same kind of “Western Values” as early XX century Germany.

The real anti-antisemitism is the genociders who are mass murdering children because of their ethnicity claiming that their actions represent all Jews and hence criticizing them is anti-semitic.

Even in their use of “If you criticize what you do you’re criticizing our race” arguments the Zionists are the closest to Nazis there is in the present day.

Spain will side with them.

Also the biggest losers in a tit-for-tat “veto war” would be Germany as the EU is still mainly a Mercantilist organization and they’re the ones who gain the most from it.

In this the Republic Of Ireland is a shinny example of Humanitarianism and shames most of the rest of Europe (I know I’m ashamed of the government of my own country).

Unlike the Republic Of Ireland not that many European countries will be able to say in the Future when people talk about the XXI century version of the Nazis that they were on the right side of History.

Meanwhile the NYC Police will be opening an emergency phone line exclusive for CEOs who feel threatened or harassed.

That’s definitely going to convince people in general that the Police “works for the community” and that they should “trust the Police”.

• Don’t break the Law for the company or the boss.
• Keep the company shit in company devices and your shit in your devices. That means company computer and phone for their stuff and your own for yours. If there’s ever any Lawsuit or Criminal investigation on the company they won’t take your stuff as evidence if you don’t at all use it for company work and won’t intrude in your privacy if the company stuff isn’t used for your own stuff.
• Even if it’s totally legal, if something that your are being ordered to do against your better advice might come back to bite you (i.e. you might get blamed for the negative outcome you predict will come from it), get that order in writing.

Even your direct lead can’t be assumed to be your friend (no matter how nice: niceness is easily and commonly faked) until you’ve gone through some proper shit together and he or she has shown themselves to be somebody that will take the hit rater than “blame their underlings” - trusts is earned, not due.

The kind of company were Management and HR go around trying to convince employees they’re like family and other similar things are simply trying to act like abusive cults.

Sound more like “abusive cult” than “family” to me.

Just gotta wait for the imaginary plane.

There are two things that the aftermath of Luigi’s action has made poignantly clear to pretty much everybody:

• That the vast majority of people no matter their party affiliation and political leanings is feeling the pain and hates the abuses that carry on being committed by a minority of people in our system with total impunity … until Luigi.
• That the Ju$tice System, the Police and most of the Press, unlike what they claim work for that minority of people, not for the rest of us.

It’s amazing just how certain parts of the system that are supposed to work for everybody (such as in this case the Police, and in other cases large parts of the Press with their “poor CEO” articles) are pretty much shouting loud and clear for all to hear that “we’re not working for you, we work for the ones that abuse you”.

Most people just discovered now with this killing of a hated CEO that what they individually felt about certain things was also felt by almost everybody, and then these bought-and-paid-for minions who for decades have been putting a lot of effort in passing themselves as “working for the community” just repeatedly and overtly signal to everybody else their true minion-of-the-rich nature.

Mind you, as a Leftie who has been skeptical of whose those elements of the current system for decades, I’m happy they’re basically outing themselves and they should keep on doing it so that everybody sees them for what they really are and who they really serve,

But people do stop believing money has value, or more specifically, their trust in the value of money can go down - you all over the History in plenty of places that people’s trust in the value of money can break down.

As somebody pointed out, if one person has all the money and nobody else has money, money has no value, so it’s logical to expect that between were we are now and that imaginary extreme point there will be a balance in the distribution of wealth were most people do lose trust in the value of money and the “wealth” anchored on merelly that value stops being deemed wealth.

(That said, the wealthy generally move their wealth into property - as the saying goes “Buy Land: they ain’t making any more of it” - but even that is backed by people’s belief and society’s enforcement of property laws and the mega-wealthy wouldn’t be so if they had to actually protect themselves their “rights” on all that they own: the limits to wealth, when anchored down to concrete physical things that the “owners” have to defend are far far lower that the current limits on wealth based on nation-backed tokens of value and ownership)

And further on point 2, the limit would determined by all that people can produce as well as, on the minus side, the costs of keeping those people alive and producing.

As it so happens, people will produce more under better conditions, so spending the least amount possible keeping those people alive doesn’t yield maximum profit - there is a sweet spot somewhere in the curve were the people’s productivity minus the costs of keeping them productive is at a peak - i.e. profit is maximum - and that’s not at the point were the people producing things are merelly surviving.

Capitalism really is just a way of the elites trying to get society to that sweet spot of that curve - under Capitalism people are more productive than in overtly autocratic systems (or even further, outright slavery) were less is spent on people, they get less education and they have less freedom to (from the point of view of the elites) waste their time doing what they want rather than produce, and because people in a Capitalist society live a bit better, are a bit less unhappy and have something to lose unlike in the outright autocratic systems, they produce more for the elites and there is less risk of rebelions so it all adds up to more profit for the elites.

As you might have noticed by now, optimizing for the sweet spot of “productivity minus costs with the riff-raff” isn’t the same as optimizing for the greatest good for the greatest number (the basic principle of the Left) since most people by a huge margin are the “riff-raff”, not the elites.

Just spreading the ground beef around rather than keep it in the form of meat patties would’ve yielded something more pizza-like whilst using the exact same ingredients (though it would probably still be an excessive amount for a non-cheese topping).

On my world account which I left a while ago I have various posts with like 20+ votes for and 20+ votes against because they were insulting/hurtful for the political tribalists but did actually make sense for those whose love for the tribe did not overrode their thinking ability.

Way too many people grow a purely emotional relationship with a politial party so never actually analyse what they do and have knee-jerk reactions to criticism of their beloved party, which paradoxically leads that party to become worse over time because in the absence of criticism of it, the shit done inside the party by the sociopaths than naturally seek power, goes on unchallenged and festers.

Granted, it’s easier to analyse US politics from the outside, but I actually behave the same when it comes to the politics of my country and even the leadership and membership of the political party I’m a member of here.

If one thinks a lot, likes to learn and, maybe more important, thinks about knowledge and learning things, that person will probably get there.

A certain educational background probably helps but is neither required nor sufficient, IMHO.

Zionism is as much “Jews” as Nazism was blue-eyed blonde people: they’re both very similar ethno-Fascist extremely-racist ideologies which glue themselves to an ethnic group claiming to represent them even while plenty of members of that ethnic group very overtly say “They do not represent me”.

Never believe Fascists when they claim to represent a nation (in the case of the traditional Fascists) or a race (in the case of the ethno-Fascists). In fact, the more general rules is “Never believe Fascists”.

The Theatre Of Identity on both sides of the aisle in the US was always bullshit to try and get more votes, if done differently:

• Most of the Democracts don’t really care about Equality (especially not in the Wealth domain, though they pay lip service to the fight against a few non-Wealth inequalities), they care about themselves and the ultra-rich.
• The Republicans don’t care about America or The American People, they care about themselves and the ultra-rich.

Mind you, this is a pretty common pattern in other countries with electoral systems that boost a pair of “center” parties - there will be a “Right” one preaching some kind of nationalist pro-nation message and a “Left” one preaching anti-discrimination along racial/gender/sexual-orientation (but never wealth) lines, but they both serve the interest of the same people and will even get together to pass legislation that increases their own salaries, reduces the effectiveness of the fight against corruption or benefit some large well entrenched “regime” corporations who (by an amazing coincidence) employ in highly paid positions lots of politicians when they retire.

There are wankers everywhere and it doesn’t take that many wankers as a proportion of the population to screw things up for everybody else.

I think it’s a general thing with highly capable persons in expert and highly intellectual domains that eventually you kinda figure out what Socrates actually meant with “All I know is that I know nothing”