What? According to your comments that would mean that for example Austria has only eight dentists in the public health care system? That’s just not true.

Of course, no matter how good a system is, we can always try to improve it, like including more services, but it’s of course a balance.

There is a simple way that would improve health care in practically all countries: Make private health care illegal, not from one day to the next, but gradually. The only way to improve health care would then be to improve health care for everybody.

Is that a real quote? Okay, now I’m not even sure if I really wanna know.

You mean that deity with the plan of just putting the eyes in backwards and threading the nerves through the retina. I think her plan was to tell us she loves octopuses more. They don’t have a blind spot because of messed up nerve routing - but what do I know 🤣

Belly buttons are scars. Sure he could make them but why would he? So that they look like other humans? Sounds like a reason to not do it and make them distinct because they are the first humans.

And in practically all drawings do Adam and Eve have belly buttons - Think about that 🤣

I think you underestimate how stupid he is.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_number_of_civilian_guns_per_capita_by_country

America is top of the list yet nothing happens. Seems like those “to defend against rogue government” arguments are just talk anyway and the entire world told you that for years.

Looks like Americans are all talk and just keep the guns around just for a higher suicide rate and school shootings.

I see what you mean but that’s not what I thought China did. I thought they just declared every prisoner automatically an organ donor which would totally be fine IMHO.

I live in Europe (Austria) and the solitary-based health care system is amazing. Automatically declaring everybody a donor is the best thing you can do (in in that case there wouldn’t even be a difference if you are a prisoner or not).

If you ask me we should even get rid of the option to opt out unless in well founded court approved exceptions. Opting out of being an organ donor is probably the most egocentric, selfish thing one could do. You are dead and you still want to deny helping others at literally no additional cost for you.

It also has practically the opposite effect of what you mentioned. If you only have a few organ donors and one is in a bad condition in a hospital there a probably a few people that hope they don’t make it to get the organs. But if everybody is an organ donor the situation gets much simpler because there isn’t this artificial scarcity.

Long story short, I haven’t heard a single good argument for not being an organ donor except that people could care less about the paper work to opt-in. That’s why the European opt-out system is way better, but many US citizens probably would call that communism :-)

Why would they phase that out? Once you are dead you don’t need organs. I’m so happy to live in a country where you have to explicitly opt out of organ donation if you don’t want to be a donor (many EU countries do it that way).

Every country where you have to opt in to be an organ donor has it completely backwards.

Update: ok maybe, I should have read the article

sometimes when patients are still alive

Ok that’s fucked up

(sorry for the long answer)

Besides the vendor-lock-in and “enshitification” things (which are also a direct consequence of capitalism) just compare the Microsoft Office Suite against LibreOffice. It’s not even close.

Don’t get me wrong it works good enough for typical use-cases but the difference in depth, quality and polish is huge. Same with Photoshop vs Gimp, After Effects and other Adobe stuff.

Tons of software doesn’t even have proper Open Source equivalents because they are so nieche (compared to office software or VLC for example).

Unity (vs Godot), IDA Pro (vs Ghidra), EnCase, SolidWorks, etc.

Check out how Mozilla Firefox makes its money. They are over 80% funded by Google and make all kinds of shitty decision. Not because they are bad people but somebody has to pay development because good software doesn’t just happen because a hand full of junior devs have some free time.

Look at the shitty Ubuntu decisions, also done because somebody needs to pay for development.

Look at audacity, redis, FluentAssertions, OpenOffice, MongoDB, ElasticSearch, MySql, IdentityServer4 and many more OpenSource projects that went commercial or changed their license because it was unsustainable.

You can of course always fork, but the forked project than has the same issues. Development works as long there are skilled people motivated to practically donate their free time in exchange for nothing. That already greatly limits the people that even can work on open source and if their situation changes history repeats.

It’s not even OpenSource only. Look at YouTube creators especially science educators. A lot of them with great content and talent explaining various topics. But also trying to sell you stuff like squarespace, Brilliant and NordVPN because it would be unsustainable otherwise.

So yes great (by that I mean big polished good quality “unenshitified”) FOSS won’t happen under capitalism because writing software is time-consuming.

Why do you think people pirate commercial software like AutoCAD, Photoshop, Lightroom, InDesign, MS Office, SketchUp, SolidWorks, etc.? Because they are polished in a way no open source project could be, because hundreds of engineers worked for decades on those.

All that said, FOSS is great. I use and rely on a tons of OpenSource software, self-host a lot of services, regularly contribute to quite a few projects and also am the maintainer of some libraries other people use (even commercially) and I still stand by what I wrote before:

Open Source can’t be as polished and high quality as big commercial software because it doesn’t have the funds to do that. Five motivated people are not enough to write an After Effects competitor.

Probably won’t happen under capitalism. It’s way too expensive (time consuming) to write good software/make good products.

I’m from Europe and I always assumed that America does that, because it’s the cheapest option by far.

Approval voting and more parties could theoretically improve things quite a bit. But switching to approval voting is probably not simple because why should the biggest parties support something that hurts them.

Hetzner ❤️

I think I know what you mean and it’s true if you look at world class. But that’s the reason why sometimes we use those properties to cluster people into groups to make it more fair. A lot of fighting sports are split into weight classes. We have paralympics, and we split many sports into male and female. Even in chess where almost everybody agrees that there is very likely no performance difference between man and women, but there are so many man playing chess that statistics alone tells you that most outliers (best and worst players) are also men.

But with “fairness” you have to draw the line somewhere or the groups that are able to play against each other would be too small. In the extreme it would mean that it’s only fair if you compete against yourself, like in trying to break you own personal records.

Even paralympics aren’t fair. It makes a difference to shoot with a bow if you are missing a leg, or an eye or an arm. Getting too specific will certainly make it fairer but would result in more groups and less people that would be allowed to compete against each other.

I’m personally not interested in watching any form of spots, so I couldn’t care less about who’s allowed to compete against whom, but I think it’s only understandable if people that went through puperty without testosterone would complain if they would have to compete against more and more people who went through testosterone puperty.

They are Trump supporters. Not voting is also decision. You vote “I’m fine with whoever wins”.

If you really think about it a ton of things are way too cheap so in a lot of scenarios it’s way cheaper to buy something new compared to repairing something old.

Think of a nail for example, from digging up some rocks that contain a bit more iron than other rocks, process them through many stages many of us (including me) have no idea, just to ship them around the planet. But if you have a bent or really messed up nail, everybody would just throw that refined material away because it’s cheaper than a cent.

If a person goes through testosterone puperty there are undeniable advantages over everybody that didn’t, in sports where physical strengths matters. I’d really love to get my mind changed on that, could you please name the study and/or journal where it was published.

The stuff private contractors write is typically complete crap with respect to security. There was never a leak where some proprietary communication software was leaked and all security researchers were stunned about how well though through everything was.

But the opposite happens all the time that some government funded closed source military software gets leaked and everybody start’s laughing about how poorly that crap was implemented.

Only because you consider one of earths poles to be “up” which it’s not.