mechoman444

O! Let’s see if I can stir up some shit!

AI is awesome! I use it all the time.

Socialism is bullshit and sucks really bad!

There are only two genders.

Reddit is a great place with really great communities. Spez is a nice dude!

United States immigration is doing a great job of deporting criminals!

Trump 2028.

😀

You’ve really shown your age with that reference.

So you’re basically a 40k dreadnought. 😂

I fully agree that 1,500 people is a perfectly reasonable sample size for getting a useful picture of what may be happening in a much larger population. I have no argument with the methodology on that point.

My primary issue is with the title itself, which literally says that 92% of people aren’t going to the doctor. That is not what the underlying data actually establishes.

I understand that websites, news aggregators, and media outlets need compelling headlines to get people to click, read, and interact with advertisements. But there is a line between making a headline attention-grabbing and deliberately phrasing it in a way that creates a completely misleading impression of what the study actually found.

If the headline requires the reader to read the entire article before discovering that the statistic means something substantially different from what the headline plainly implies, then the headline is, for all practical purposes, misinformation. That may generate clicks, but it comes at the expense of accuracy and public trust.

O God. So gross. I wouldn’t touch you with a dog’s dick.

I use the built-in grammar editor on Google keyboard because I’m doing everything off my phone.

So that’s where you may be picking up on the AI generation thing.

But the words are mine.

It’s a good thing you deleted that comment because it was a complete non sequitur.

Yes, that would also be true. I was just trying to be as concise as possible.

The problem with American healthcare isn’t simply that healthcare is expensive, or even that people aren’t receiving it. The deeper problem is that we’ve built healthcare into a predominantly profit-driven corporate system.

And to be clear, I don’t have a problem with people making money from medicine. There is absolutely nothing wrong with profiting from developing a revolutionary medical technology, discovering a new treatment, manufacturing equipment, or creating a drug that genuinely improves people’s lives. Innovation requires investment, and investment requires the possibility of a return.

The problem is what happens when the entire healthcare system is subjected to the same corporate incentives as every other industry: maximize revenue, minimize costs, consolidate market power, increase shareholder returns, and treat the patient as a revenue source.

Healthcare isn’t a normal consumer product. When you need a refrigerator, you can decide whether you want to buy one. When you’re having a heart attack, you don’t exactly have the luxury of shopping around for the best deal.

That’s where the fundamental problem lies. It’s not that healthcare is allowed to make money. It’s that we’ve allowed profit maximization to become one of the primary organizing principles of a system where the consumer often has virtually no ability to negotiate, comparison-shop, or simply walk away.

The “92% of Americans aren’t going to the doctor because it’s too expensive” claim is misleading.

The 92% figure comes from a survey of just 1,507 U.S. adults conducted for financial-services company JG Wentworth. It reportedly found that 92% had delayed or abandoned some form of medical care because of cost. That is very different from saying that 92% of Americans don’t go to the doctor, or that only 8% of Americans “attend to their health.”

There is much better independent data showing that cost really is a major problem, but the numbers are nowhere near 92%. KFF’s 2025 national polling found that 36% of adults said they had skipped or postponed needed health care during the previous year because of cost. KFF also found that 37% of insured adults reported doing so, so having insurance clearly doesn’t eliminate the problem.

Even better, an analysis using National Health Interview Survey data, rather than a private company’s survey, found that about 17% of U.S. adults delayed or did not get health care because of cost in 2024.

So the underlying story is absolutely legitimate: healthcare costs are causing millions of Americans to delay or forgo care. But presenting a JG Wentworth survey’s 92% figure as though it means “only 8% of Americans seek medical care” is a pretty substantial distortion of what the survey actually measured.

The more defensible takeaway is: American healthcare is expensive enough that a significant minority of Americans are delaying needed care because they cannot afford it. That’s bad enough without turning the statistic into something it doesn’t actually say.

Like so many other industries, the music industry has been thoroughly consolidated by massive record labels, publishers, and corporate interests. Much of the music we’re exposed to on a daily basis is no longer simply music it’s a commercial product engineered to generate as much revenue as possible.

If you’re looking for something genuinely specific, unconventional, or outside the mainstream, you usually have to go looking for it yourself. Unfortunately, basic searches on YouTube or Spotify aren’t necessarily going to lead you there. Their algorithms tend to reinforce what is already popular rather than uncovering the deeper corners of the musical landscape.

But that music is out there. There is an enormous amount of incredible, creative, and genuinely original music being made right now. You just have to dig past the commercial surface to find it.

Yes you do. Clearly you do. Since you think I’m a fascist or liberal words I have no doubt you don’t know the meaning of and have been responding to me steadily.

Let me ask you a question are you stupid?

Disregard my previous comment if you can still see it.

You are intellectually dishonest, willfully ignorant, and apparently incapable of engaging with anything I actually said. Responding with incoherent babble instead of addressing the argument isn’t a discussion it’s a waste of my time.

Good day.

deleted by creator

Because it is defensible. Capitalism isn’t a living entity that personally insulted you or wronged your family. It doesn’t have intentions, feelings, or a moral compass. It is an economic system. The people operating within that system are the ones capable of abusing it, exploiting it, or using it to enrich themselves at someone else’s expense.

And yes, capitalism has historically produced better outcomes than many of the alternative economic systems we’ve actually attempted. That’s not a defense of every aspect of capitalism; it’s a statement of historical fact. You don’t get to dismiss an empirical observation simply because you dislike the conclusion.

What I find particularly amusing is how you people seem to think that confidently declaring something makes it an argument. You haven’t actually refuted anything I’ve said. You haven’t provided evidence, addressed the historical record, or even engaged with the distinction between an economic system and the people abusing it. You’ve simply produced a handful of indignant declarations, apparently mistaking the intensity of your feelings for the strength of your argument. That’s not analysis. That’s ideological ventriloquism with the critical-thinking portion conveniently removed. If you want to disagree with me, by all means bring an argument. But if all you’ve got is “capitalism bad” repeated with increasing levels of outrage, you’re not actually contributing anything to the discussion.

First of all, thank you. Your response was well-mannered and thoughtful, which puts it several multitudes above the usual riffraff on this platform who encounter criticism of a belief they hold and immediately start foaming at the mouth.

Let me be perfectly clear about what I am arguing against: the wholesale slaughter of an entire group of people.

That is not revolution. That is not justice. That is not liberation. It is simply another form of barbarism, dressed up in whatever ideological language makes the person committing it feel righteous.

Human history is littered with the corpses of people who were convinced that this time the mass killing was justified because their victims were the right people to hate. It has never ended well. One hatred does not magically become virtuous because you attach a political theory to it.

There is already more than enough hatred in this world.

And no, I am not opposed to violence in every conceivable circumstance. There are political leaders in the Middle East and Russia whom I would have very little sympathy for if they were violently removed from power. There are people who commit such extraordinary acts of cruelty that I have no moral objection to the idea that they should face the ultimate consequence.

I can even understand the moral argument behind what Luigi Mangione did, regardless of where someone ultimately draws the legal or ethical line.

But there is an enormous difference between saying some individuals have forfeited their moral claim to our sympathy and saying an entire class of human beings deserves to die.

That distinction matters.

I understand why people are angry. I understand the plight of people being crushed by the economic and political systems we have constructed. I understand the desire to smash a system that appears fundamentally indifferent to the people trapped beneath it.

And I am not even particularly enthusiastic about capitalism. I see its failures. I see its contradictions. I see the suffering it can produce and the ways in which wealth and power concentrate themselves.

But here’s where I draw the fucking line:

“Kill the capitalists.”

No.

Because the moment your solution to oppression becomes finding another category of human beings to exterminate, you haven’t transcended the system you despise. You’ve simply inherited its worst characteristics.

You have become the thing you claim to be fighting.

And that’s the part nobody seems to want to hear.

If your revolution requires you to dehumanize an entire population before you can justify killing them, then congratulations, you haven’t built a better ideology. You’ve just found a new excuse for the oldest human vice imaginable.

We have to be better.

Someone has to be willing to say the quiet part out loud: killing people because they belong to the wrong class does not make us morally superior to the people we condemn for doing the same thing to someone else.

You don’t get moral absolution simply because your victims are different from theirs.

If the only thing separating your politics from the atrocities of the past is that you have chosen a different group of people to hate, then you haven’t learned a damn thing from history.

You’ve just changed the uniforms.

I stopped myself initially from looking but then looked anyway because my self-control is bullshit.

House spiders are almost exclusively harmless and gain a terrible reputation. Down here in the south east we have an abundance of orb weaver spiders.

Absolutely gorgeous and, for the most part, totally harmless. I genuinely don’t understand why people are so terrified of these things. Spiders are one of the reasons we’re not completely overrun with insects and other pests, and most species would much rather avoid us than have anything to do with us.

The brown recluse and black widow should obviously be treated with respect, but even they are highly misunderstood. Neither species is particularly aggressive toward humans, and bites are relatively uncommon. They generally bite only when threatened, trapped against the skin, or otherwise disturbed. Their reputation is considerably worse than their actual behavior.

Spiders aren’t out looking for people to bite. They’re predators doing an extremely useful job of keeping insect populations under control. Unless you have a medically significant species in your home, there’s usually very little reason to be afraid of them and quite a few reasons to appreciate them.

and I can’t get high from edibles anyway.

Famous last words.

Yes.

Yes. And I think it’s important to understand exactly what a convection oven actually is.

At its most basic, it’s an oven with a heating element and a fan that circulates hot air around the cooking chamber. That’s it. The circulating air improves heat transfer and helps food cook and brown more evenly.

Now, manufacturers have increasingly started calling a particular implementation of convection an “air fryer” and charging a premium for it, as though they’ve invented an entirely new cooking technology. They haven’t. Convection cooking has been around for decades.

An air fryer is essentially a compact, highly optimized convection oven: hot air is circulated rapidly around the food, usually with a basket or perforated tray that allows that air to contact more of the food’s surface.

So when you’re shopping for a range and you see one advertised as having an “Air Fry” function, don’t automatically assume you’re getting some revolutionary new appliance. In many cases, you’re paying extra for a marketing term applied to a convection system that has existed for generations.