Notices by Tofu Golem (tofugolem@mastodon.social)

@arstechnica
Self-driving vehicles are not ready for prime time.

Just get us better mass transit for fuck's sake.

I don't have solid numbers, but I feel justified in saying that the number of deaths/yr from lack of health coverage has gone up since the passing of ACA/Obamacare.

While the ACA is orders of magnitude better than what we had before, it says something that the number of deaths/year has not gone down significantly, and has likely gone up instead of down.

This shows that the solution was wildly inadequate compared to the scope of the problem it claimed to solve.

https://www.bu.edu/sph/news/articles/2016/18-charts-that-make-the-case-for-public-health/

2/7

I looked for a graph of American deaths per year due to lack of healthcare going back to the passing of the ACA to make a point, but I couldn't find anything that was quite exactly right. Sorry.

Around the time ACA/Obamacare passed, the news articles talked about 40k Americans dying per year.

In the current debate about Brian Thompson and Luigi Mangione, similar sources say 60k. Some on independent media are saying 100k.

I don't have good sources for this. Sorry.

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/03/25/1164819944/live-free-and-die-the-sad-state-of-u-s-life-expectancy

1/7

Home prices are out of control because of Wall Street using homes as investments. Rents are out of control for a variety of reasons, including price-fixing by landlords.

Rather than actually address the root causes of the problem, Harris offered what amounted to a very small drop of relief in a very large bucket of pain.

The why is not too hard to figure out. Dems get a lot of money from health insurers, so they don't want to interfere with them in any fundamental way.

4/7

This seems to be a running theme with Dems.

Kamala Harris offered "up to" $25k down payment assistance to first-time home-buyers. Once again, this was a nice gesture, but wildly inadequate compared to the scope of the problem it purported to solve. The housing crisis is out of control, and her solution would have helped a tiny fraction of those who need to pay for someplace to live (that would be, oh, everyone).

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/harris-propose-25k-payment-support-1st-time-homeowners/story?id=112877568

3/7

America tied its imperialist strategy to propping up Israel and assisting in their genocide.

But I think our corrupt campaign finance system is hurting them the most. It results in this endless parade of performative gestures (remember Nancy Pelosi kneeling in prayer over BLM, then doing nothing about that?).

The thing is, self-serving bias probably blinds them to seeing corrupt campaign finance as the problem. After all, they get lots of money out of it.

6/7

The people profiting from the housing crisis are giving Dems money, so again, they offer a performative gesture that offered the appearance of a solution without actually fixing any of the causes of the problem.

It seems like Dems are always looking for the absolute bare minimum they have to do in order to get the yelling to go down without fundamentally changing anything.

Dems lost last November for a lot of reasons. The country is racist. The country is fascist.

5/7

I'm pretty sure nothing can prevent America from collapsing into an orgy of corruption and authoritarianism, but just in case anyone is still entertaining the idea of "working within the system" to fix things instead of just waiting for the inevitable French-style revolution, nothing can get fixed unless and until we get ALL private money out of election finance.

Think of it as a politician buyback program.

7/7

@wonderofscience
It's been 55 years since the bottom picture, and air/space travel have not significantly improved since then.

Planes are a little safer and a little more fuel efficient. Low Earth orbit is more cluttered. Other than that, not a big change.

It was self-defense.

Remember when everyone got mad about privacy issues, and Microsoft assured us that Recall would only be on ARM-based "copilot" computers?

Windows Recall will be mandatory on every Windows 11 computer after 24H2.

It might be time to switch to Linux.

5-minute video
https://youtube.com/watch?v=G9FRadIkkE0&si=mqx7tmYyCRCqpiEr

Yes, it's a year old, but this is a reminder that Texas is run by Nazis. They aren't even trying to hid it anymore.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/sep/20/texas-teacher-fired-anne-frank-book-ban

I need a shirt like this.

@nixCraft
Robot: What is my purpose?
Rick: You pass butter.
Robot: Oh my God.

@arstechnica

A percentage of the children who get measles will die.

We are deliberately allowing more children to get measles so that certain adults can pretend that they are more expert in medical science than medical researchers, and more expert in medicine than doctors.

Concentration camp. The accurate term would be "concentration camp."

I'm really sick and tired of the euphemisms used by the American media.

#media #Palestine

The reason the Western world is so fucked up right now is that the mainstream media normalizes the extremism of fascists by not even being willing to accurately describe what they are.

@nixCraft
Is anyone else reminded of the NFT craze?

E.g. "Look! We're putting NFTs in video games! Think of all the microtransactions! You're going to love NFTs in video games!"

We are trained to make excuses for the inexcusable.

So that's how that works.