Numberone @ Numberone @startrek.website

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2 yr. ago

I know Germany has a public / private system. Private insurers reimburse more, so they're more desirable from the perspective of medical professionals. But there is a public baseline that Germans can fall back on. This is second hand info though so take it with a grain of salt.

Wait, what? Is this confirmed? Please do explain!

Upvotes for Tali!

I genuinely don't understand why so many people go with the network brand. AFAIK all of the US networks have MVNO's that operate on their networks at much lower cost. Some of those virtual operators are even owned by the big guys, e.g. Cricket on ATT. My coworkers pay literally hundreds of dollars more per month than is necessary, and what, they get a few Mbps faster data rates? Is that really worth it?

Edit: TIL a lot of people have had a hard time with MVNO's. My experience has been excellent and consistent, but that apparently doesn't generalize.

Came here to mention Trolls 2 as well. This film has great standing in my family.

This whole twitter thing is like some lib version of a moral panic. Who cares, just get off it if you don't like the experience. But no, they all need to tell everyone how this makes them so morally pure.

I gave blood recently. One of the questions they ask you is have you been in jail or juvi recently. I assume for the reason you stated above. I.E. having been in jail makes your blood less desireable. Not sure if they'll actually reject you, but they sure ask.

I too had a panic

Always an upvote for Doom OST

She's not blonde🤔

Oh I see. Yeah that's cool. I've seen several posts around the fediverse that take a real tsk tsk signal user kind of tone, So I responded to yours kind of defensively. As a person with middle of the road tech knowledge I also curious if how I think about it stands up to scrutiny (because people will tell me!). Didn't mean to distract from the intent. Thanks for posting this in any case.

"You wouldn't download a TV"😂

For me using signal wasn't about becoming Jason Bourne, it was about changing the threat model. I don't have any dilusions of grandeur that I can't be owned if I'm targeted, but you know what? My calls and texts aren't stored with my phone company with a direct link to the Government and advertisers. That may be low hanging fruit, but that's dealing with most of the issues the average user is going to run into. I'd suggust that the step from SMS to Signal is of greater benifit to a normal user than from signal to something more advanced. And, fwiw it's open sourced and audited, which gives me more confidence than something like imessage or WhatsApp, despite similarities im encryption schemes.

Yeah, I guess that's just more responsibility on us as individuals...hurray -_-

Thanks for engaging with me on this, I feel like it did clarify some things in my mind just having to justify myself. I appreciate. I hope I see you out there again Beltalowda.🖖

He left in 2020 because they wouldn't allow him enough " editorial freedom". The end of that conflict should put you at ease with the intercept.

Yeah, this argument is getting at what's underlying my concern I think. There is a huge vacuum of trustworthy authority right now. It seems like institutions have been lighting themselves on fire left and right. This may be a problem that simply comes from the existence of the internet. 50 years ago everyone just trusted that Walter Cronkite was telling them the truth every evening, he was a big arbiter, likely because they didn't have any other sources of information the internet makes available. He may have been acting in good faith, he may have been parroting defense department talking points, who knows. Now we have a website to cater to every intellectual pretaliction. That isn't helpful to find definitive truth. Add to that, over and over we've found existing authorities to be completely self serving (e.g. the government lying about WMD in Iraq, CDC obfuscating it's funding of gain of function research early in the pandemic, recent revelations of perhaps long running corruption concern in the supreme court). Maybe that's because they've gotten worse, maybe they've always been like that and we didn't have enough information to notice it. So, like you said, all of this is happening and we no longer have arbiters to sift out this wheat from the chaff as it were. That's a huge problem.

So what's the solution? I certainly don't want Republicans to be removing books from their shelves because they deem them "harmful to the children" or whatever the fuck. But at the same time, I don't want self serving billionaires (the shitshow that twitter has become) or newly revealed corrupt institutions making those decisions for me either. So what's the solution?

I think right now it's basically an unsolved problem, with all of us just floating around to the sources that suit us best, allowing for the divides between us to absolutely explode in breadth and width (I have family that has strait faced told me that COVID was created and released on purpose to kill Republicans...shit like that). I know that I've struggled with who to "trust" consciously. And maybe that's the real difference between our perspectives is just that. Maybe that's what this all comes down to is that you don't trust American right wing institutions (rightfully) and I've lost faith in all of them. I don't know what the move is, but we need to figure something out fast.

Isn't the process of refuting something properly by definition critical rather than uncritical? Not all ideas are equal by a long shot, I'm just saying someone shouldn't decide for us which ones we can engage with.

All ideas deserve to be refuted, which is why suppression isn't the answer.

As far as the specifics of your claims, I don't think anything has been definitively show to be true regarding the origin of COVID. The paper you linked said that the first hotspot they found were in the wet markets, assuming that's the case, it still doesn't say if it was naturally produced or as part of a "gain of function" research program that was in place at the time.

https://theintercept.com/collections/origins-of-covid/

Check this out for a deeper dive into the intercepts work on corona virus origins. There is no smoking gun, no gotcha moment, in fact it may be a natural origin. My point wasn't that it did happen in a lab leak, but that lab leak turned out to be a viable theory of origin, in spite of how it was portrayed by officials, the media and social media.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/16/politics/biden-intel-review-covid-origins/index.html

The above article is quite a different point of view from what was being said by officials earlier in the pandemic. Again my point isn't to argue lab leak, but to say that if the establishment had it's way, this question would have been wiped away and never investigated. The complexity of the issue would have been lost to the public. That seems like censorship to me. Not book burning, but still censorship.

I 100% agree with your point about amplification though. That's a complication in the issue here because they are incentivised to push divisive, exreme views in order to drive engagement. There is a lot of discussion to be had there.

Regarding my mention of Hunter Biden, I wasn't lamenting that images of him were removed from social media. That's just basic cleaning up of feeds that needs to happen. I mean the fact that despite being verified by the FBI it was treated as bearing all of the hallmarks of Russian mis-information at the behest of other law enforcement agencies. It was then suppressed.

I don't know. You can assume that I'm parroting in bad faith if you want, but I hope you don't.

I'm pretty far on the left and I'd debate that Democrats are also very fond of the status quo. But your point stands.

I wasn't trying to say that they're the same, I just think it's important to be weilding the same analysis for "allies" as for "enemies". Otherwise you get into a situatiin like the US, telling the world that Russia is a war criminal for using cluster munitions, then sending Ukrain cluster munitions.

Oh we're 100% on the same page about books, there is no equivalent to that with the dems. But I was talking about the larger idea of censorship, not books specifically. I don't think that you can say with honesty though that specific institutions are specifically attending to drive narratives in ways that Democrats want them to. Cable media is an easy one, tech companies are another. Shadowbanning and suppression of specific topics have and are happening, and are censorship. They algorithmically and explicitely tamped down legitimate persuits like discussing lab leak, until it actually became the most feaseable beginning of COVID. They suppressed the hunter Biden bullshit (I'm not taking that on its merits, just saying it happened, and near an election).

On another note, I'm not your enemy here. I responded to something that I thought I could add something to. You obviously did the same. We can make Lemmy a more healthy place to talk than Reddit was.