If you just made that up not only @BestOf but send it somewhere, that deserves to be published imo, you’ve like surpassed all of Ogden Nash with that
2 Likes
well you are drunker than I if you think that was original
I am drunk and high but not yet drunker than you.
lol thanks. unless you’re making fun of me. hard to tell!
Never heard this guy. I like him!
I’ll drink to that
I’m sure it’s been done before, but I didn’t copy anyone. I was inspired by @fidgetUK’s haiku in keed’s thread.
2 Likes
Not making fun, it’s the best haiku I’ve ever read, although generally I have low opinion of the form, but yours is meta in the best way possible.
2 Likes
https://twitter.com/bendreyfuss/status/1203729478129725441?s=19
Have to watch with audio on to truly appreciate.
9 Likes
I’m just getting into this but it seems like the tldr is literally everyone in charge knew that Afghanistan was a losing effort that was a waste of time, money, and human lives, and they knowingly lied to the public about it for ~20 years.
4 Likes
This shit right here is why normal people’s reaction to liberals telling them that the government is going to fix something is to groan loudly.
Seriously anyone who has ever dealt with the federal government has experienced why so few people want them to directly run anything else. The stories about the VA do not inspire a great deal of confidence in Washington running a true single payer system.
I still think we need to give the federal government more power to get where we need to go… but part of that is acknowledging that there are some deeply broken parts of our system that need a full blown rework to be flatter and faster. There’s a lot of bloat now, and it’s not unreasonable for middle and upper middle class people who already pay quite a bit in taxes to expect government to become more efficient before it asks for more of their money.
We need to just leave Afghanistan and take our loss. We also need to cut back the military super hard and do some real soul searching on the true costs and benefits of our foreign policy spend. The Pentagon is long overdue to be sized correctly for the US’s actual defense needs, which are pretty minimal tbh. The rest of the world will probably be marginally worse off, but not as much as the military people are telling us they will be… and they won’t spend as much as we were spending on weapons.
“The government sucks, put us in charge and we’ll prove it.”
- Republicans
9 Likes
Idk about others’ experiences here, but I have found negotiating BCBS’ labyrinth of phone menus and clueless, disinterested “customer service” reps to be every bit as byzantine as any dealings I’ve had with SSA or IRS. I have found no discernible difference. At least I get the feeling, even if it’s imaginary, that I have some power to help solve the latter every four years with my vote.
3 Likes
Wat? Last I checked, numerous studies show the VA does a much better job than private hospitals.
I totally agree and have had similar experiences. I think the big takeaway from the last 40 years of the intentional corrosion of our institutions is that transparency is very important. Much more important than keeping the governments secrets.
I know it annoys skydiver because she knows that technical specs are the majority of the classified stuff out there (and she’s probably right about that) but I think we should blow up all the secrecy laws and force the government to be 10,000,000% more transparent.
The problem here is that people (in many cases justifiably) don’t trust the government. I think the best way to deal with that would be to put 99.999% of what the government does on the internet for everyone to see.
You really have to stop swallowing military stats whole dude. What part of they aren’t real don’t you get exactly?
The Walter Reed scandal was only 5 years ago, and from what I’ve read nothing has changed. Wait times for people to see doctors stretch out months… and to say they’ve failed completely on mental health is a massive understatement.
To be clear I’m not defending private hospitals on any of this stuff, those studies were made a lot easier by private healthcare being so woefully shitty. They are spectacular messes as well.
Doesn’t change the VA’s well deserved reputation for being a bureaucratic dystopian hellscape.
Also please remember I’m the biggest single booster for single payer healthcare on this whole forum. But I can also call the government out on its own bullshit and still be a liberal. I personally think the first side to get its shit together is going to win the whole thing. There’s plenty to not like about government, and we need to be actively trying to figure out how to make it much more efficient.
Would you believe the RAND Corporation? They’re not exactly in the tank for single payer:
The government would be 1000000x better if shit was just quicker and they used common sense for a lot of stuff. I was sick as an infant and lost a lot of my hearing. All you need to do is look at an audiogram and a doctor would say “Anything below that line is bad,” and you would know I have bad hearing.
Because of my hearing loss, I can get Medicare. I didn’t know this until I was 30 years old. My mom didn’t have health insurance and no one told her I would qualify for Medicare. She died when I was 25 so she never knew I could have had it to begin with. She also would have been able to name me as a dependent and get money from SS to pay my bills. Again, no one told her so it never crossed anyone’s mind.
When I found out I could qualify, I had to hire a lawyer. I had to go to 3 doctors to confirm I had hearing loss. That entire process took 8 months. Then after I was approved, there was a 5 month waiting period. So even that took 13 months before I finally had health insurance.
Even though I’ve had hearing loss since being an infant, I still need to have my hearing tested every 5-7 years to see if my hearing has improved. (Narrator: His hearing did not improve and it never will.) And every single step along the way between making an appointment, seeing the receptionist, nurse, doctor, audiologist, etc. all agree it’s entirely pointless.
Oh and tax payers pay for all this. Thanks guys! I figure over the course of the past 15 years it’s probably cost $100K easy. Instead of you know, one test that shows my hearing loss on an audiogram.
6 Likes
It’s right there on the front page of the study that it doesn’t address the big problem in the va system which is speed of access. And no I don’t trust the rand corporation lol. I trust basically no one. To trust a study I pretty much have to read it cover to cover. I’ve been burned too many times by academics, politicians, government agencies, and obviously interest groups.
The shittiest thing about being good at reading these kinds of things is how quickly you realize that the vast majority of them are fatally biased because funding.
Well, of course if you take the military as a proxy for the entire government, you’re going to think the entire government sucks.
This conversation is too high-content for this thread imo.
To get us back on track with a Fuck Amazon story, on Cyber Monday I bought a computer on Amazon (nothing special, advertised as $350 and I got it for $300, but seemed like a really good deal for the specs). It still hasn’t shown up, so I checked in the app and saw “this item is likely lost or stolen, you can request a refund or replacement,” so I reached out to customer service. They informed me that they could refund it (which they did) but could not replace it. The computer was now only being offered by third-party sellers: for $390 as a refurbished and $540 new. One customer service agent offered me a $90 gift card credit to cover the difference between what I originally purchased and the refurbished one, but I kept pushing–I wanted the computer I bought, new, for the price I bought it at.
Finally I got to the highest level of customer service (I asked if I could speak to his manager and he told me his only bosses were administrative/operations people). He told me they couldn’t give me a $240 credit to buy a new one since that was sold by a third-party and, I quote, “Amazon doesn’t do price-matching.” I don’t know why the $90 was allowed, but since it appeared to be $90 or nothing, I took the $90. Now I have an extra $90 in Amazon gift card, which I guess is nice, but I just wanted the damn computer.
After doing further research, I suspect it was a mistake price on their part–this computer (same brand, as close to the exact specs as I can get) seems to retail around $550 at other places, like Best Buy, and not the $350 that was shown as the original advertised price–a $350 version on comparable websites appears to be spec’d down a bit. Additionally, UPS never registered receipt of the item, so it’s not like it got lost in transit–it never made it from a warehouse to UPS. My theory is that they fucked up and decided to just not fulfill the order rather than eat $250 in mistake-discount.
Fuck you, Jeff.
3 Likes