• 0 Posts
  • 11 Comments
Joined 4 months ago
cake
Cake day: August 15th, 2024

help-circle






  • It’s even worse than that. Paying private insurance pays for other peoples’ healthcare and the paychecks of MBAs and C-suite execs on top.

    I genuinely don’t understand how some people can’t seem to grasp the business model here. For anyone to get any net value out of insurance, by definition, there has to be at minimum an equivalent number of people who pay in more than they would than if they didn’t have insurance at all.

    This doesn’t change whether it’s a government-funded single-payer system or a private corporation. The only thing that significantly changes when it is made a private corporation is it (theoretically) permits it to be nimbler to adapt to change by slicing out all the red tape a government-run entity would have, at the cost of shifting the focus from maximizing benefit to the public to profit-seeking that may incidentally also benefit the public from time to time as an occasional side effect.

    Insurance isn’t a magic subscription that pulls money out of thin air to pay for everyone’s whatever as long as one is a member, it fundamentally comes from other people getting short-sticked. That is the whole point. You throw money into the abyss when you’re doing well, in exchange the abyss won’t swallow you whole when you’re not doing well. That’s the contract. If everyone who joined was entitled to more than they paid in, we’d call it a Ponzi scheme.

    I’m sure you know all this, just venting a rant to no one in particular…





  • pixelscript@lemm.eetoMemes@lemmy.mlZen Z
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    2
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    4 months ago

    An analog clock is just three sets of loading bars with their ends glued together. You can tell geometrically what proportion of each division of time (day, hour, and minute) are spent and what proportion remains. You don’t even need the numbers.

    If you need stopwatch-level precision, sure, a digital display is superior. But how often do you need that? Most of what I need clocks for is, “Oh, it’s about a quarter to noon, I have a lunch appointment to get to”.

    It is my personal preference to visually intuit that the clock hands are roughly separating the hour into 3/4 spent and 1/4 remaining and use that to know how much time I have left to the hour, rather than read the symbols “42” on the display and manually do the mental gymnastics of “well that’s basically 45, which is three quarters of the way to 60 minutes”.

    I’ll admit this benefit is marginal.