Daniel Quinn

Canadian in the UK here. It’s a disaster.

The NHS is treated like “medical for the poors”. If you can afford it, you get private cover and get treated faster by the same doctors sometimes even in the same hospitals.

So you get the same American bullshit: “sorry, that hospital is out of network” and “if your insurance deems this scan to be uncovered, you’ll be liable for a £12k fee. Sign here.” with the added bonus that tonnes of public money is sunk into a national system that’s being parasitised by private interests.

That alone would be bad enough, but the above model also ensures that support for spending on the NHS isn’t as politically attractive, because those with the money have a “fuck you, I got mine” mentality thanks to the private option.

If you want a healthy national health care system, the rich and upper class need to be standing in line with the poor for their health care.

And whose fault is that?

There’s an excellent moment in Harley Quinn s03e08 where Quinn is talking to Bruce Wayne, admiring his work as Batman. She then stops short:

But you know, if you truly wanted to help Gotham, why not start with affordable housing?

Bruce responds:

People pay for housing??

The recognition came amid an international push to end the violence that began with a Hamas-led attack in Israel that killed 1,200 people and took more than 250 others hostage on Oct. 7, 2023.

It’s just nuts that organisations like the CBC continue to parrot this sort of thing, like Gaza hasn’t been under violent occupation for generations.

They’re all on the high seas and they’re all excellent.

The Owl House is also fantastic. You can find the entire series on the high seas with little effort.

It’s likely a region or IP range thing. I find that when I’m on a VPN, YouTube will regularly complain like this. I just keep switching countries until one works.

I finally got around to watching this, and it’s roughly what I expected: talented, passionate people wanting to do right by the world, being let down by the utter ineptitude of the people running the event (what the fuck was up with the sound???)

No matter how good the conversations were, this video never should have been permitted release. It makes these NDP look thoroughly amateur. A budget YouTuber has better presentation than this. If they can’t figure out how to showcase their ideas with the amount of polish befitting some rando on Tiktok, why should anyone lend them their vote?

I wanna say “duh”, but Canada really does appear way behind on this so maybe it is still a revelation for some?

I can’t speak to Lunduke, but dhh is quite the piece of shit himself.

Your math is waaaaay off. Let me help you.:

Let’s assume that you commute a rather conservative distance of just 25mi to work. That’s 50mi/day, 5 days/wk, plus let’s say half that over the weekend. Assuming an (again, generous) fuel efficiency for your truck at 25mpg, given a ballpark 300mi/week, that’s 12 gallons of fuel/week. The current average price of gas in the US is a remarkably low $3.071, and that adds up to $36.85/week.

Now consider the costs of maintenance. If you’ve really had zero problems in the last 20 years on a pickup truck (honestly this is far from average), you likely did an oil change every 3 months at the very least. These days it’ll run you about $100.

In terms of insurance, I asked this site for the average cost of insuring a Toyota pickup truck for one year: $1937. Let’s be grossly optimistic and pretend that those rates will never go up.

Initial cost: (Provided)                    = 11000.00
Fuel costs: (50 × 6 ÷ 25 × 3.071 × 52 × 20) = 38326.08
Oil changes: ($100 × 4 × 20)                =  8000.00
Insurance: (1937 × 20)                      = 38740.00
Parking:                                    = ?
------------------------------------------------------
Total                                         96066.08

Excluding the cost of parking, the purchase of your miracle never-needs-repair truck if purchased today would be roughly $100,000. Note also how very conservative these values are. It’s entirely possible that your real costs are well above what I’ve stated here.

The total cost of the rental was $1000 plus fuel costs, so using our above figures, that’s a grand total of $1042.99 assuming you drove it roughly 50mi/day for all 7 days of the week. That’s assuming that you don’t opt for the much lower rates that appear to be available to you in the area of $250 - $350/week.

So, if you didn’t own a car and instead only rented one when you needed to “move a couch”, you would save just over $95,000. In other words, your insistence that you absolutely must own your own vehicle has cost you the equivalent of a downpayment on a house.

Car rentals are exceptionally cheap compared to paying to own and drive a car capable of hauling a couch for that one time 4 years ago when you needed that.

As a big car-hater myself, I can agree with most of what you’re saying here (the “but it snows” argument is baseless though, see Denmark).

I think that if you’ve chosen to live in sparsely populated areas, then being car-dependent is your choice and you should be able to have that… but you don’t get to drive your car into the city.

Cars ruin cities. They’re loud, dangerous, dirty, and they kill millions. If you’re happy to live like that, then that’s on you, but you (I’m using the “motorist demographic” here rather then the personal “you”) can’t insist on having wide, multi-lane, high speed roads and plenty of free parking where most of the world’s population actually lives. You park at the periphery and take transit or a bike into town.

It’s maddening that this is considered so novel and cutting edge. The fact that this hasn’t been a standard for research for a hundred years is a mockery of science.

What a great idea!