Hacksaw

That's just untrue. There are a lot of options between "give up" and "proceed irresponsibly". After all the animals they've scrapped why are the human subjects having the EXACT SAME PROBLEMS that were identified in the animals. This is Musk's typical "fail fast" strategy to advance research faster, but in the medical field the failures damage real humans.

Completely irresponsible!

The FDA regulatory failure with neuralink is as bad as the FAA's failure with Boeing.

Yes, good point. These people are desperate, so we should let a wildly irresponsible company, who during animal testing had identified the thread retraction issue and not fixed it, we should let them experiment on desperate humans because fuck them I guess.

Yeah the guy was able to do something cool for a while, but now he's quickly getting back to where he was and with bonus bits of metal all over his brain and no way to fix the problem.

I don't know if that's a trade he or anyone would have made going in.

They need to stop messing around with this Musk "fail fast" approach, that's not acceptable in medicine. You can't speed up your research by endangering the most desperate people in society.

Government programs IS US HELPING EACHOTHER. Sure corporations have been undermining democracy, but the government is OUR corporation. It's the only one that we get the choose what it does. The fact we're obligated to pay taxes is EXACTLY the implementation of your statement "we're obligated to help eachother"

I don't understand how you can make statements like this. The threat of violence? The government's monopoly on violence is rephrased as the will of society to ban violence in public life by restricting violence only to the enforcement of democratically selected laws. There is no other way I can conceive. Should more people have the ability to use violence to enforce their views on others? Should corporations have that right? If no one has that right how can we stop someone who decides THEY have that right?

The whole "government monopoly on violence" is for me the most absurd librarian statement of them all. What's the alternative? Who should decide what deserves violence? Who should use violence? What do we do if someone breaks this compact? Because the current answers are at least ideally "the people, through democratically enacted, clear and transparent laws", and "the people, through the police they pay for accountable only to the people" and "apply fair and balanced justice through the judiciary system, run by the people and accountable only to them". I'm in no way saying that it's working perfectly as is clear in recent politics, but it's certainly trending in the right direction in social democracies. We're closer to that ideal now than we have ever been. As far as I've seen libertarian ideology has only come up with absolutely HORRIFYING answers to these questions, or wishy washy nonsense.

That's fair.

It's very frustrating seeing someone argue for disproven theories (like the government is less efficient than the free market in arenas most countries have socialised) using easily disprovable statements (like single payer healthcare would be more expensive to US citizens than the private system you have now). Especially when those ideologies can only hurt everyone.

I do apologize for the tone since you have been respectful and I have been less so. You don't deserve the rudeness but your ideas don't deserve the consideration they get in civilised society either.

Every graph of healthcare costs vs privatisation with the US in it is necessarily a comparison between private and public healthcare systems since most countries have single payer as most of their healthcare.

The US government healthcare programs are by far the most cost effective offering in the US but it's hampered by regulations such as not having the ability to negotiate prices (until the recent tiny concession on a handful of drugs that has paid off in spades).

Finally, other large countries including India and China may have lower life expectancy, but they're close and rising rapidly compared the stagnant US trends. Of course the bang for the buck they get is at least 5x what the US gets with its ridiculous system

If you listen to online libertarians they seem to believe everything is on the tables. Utilities have already been partially privatised and they've successfully impressed the classification of broadband as a utility which would have improved service, accessibility, and price at the cost of corporate profit.

Exactly. To me all the basics of life, the bottom tiers of Maslow's pyramid can't be privatised. Healthcare, utilities, education, infrastructure, social safety nets, you need those things as a PREREQUISITE to participation in the market. The market can't provide its own prerequisites. If you don't provide these things you simply cannot have a competitive free market in the first place.

Wow, you seriously still believe that corporations compete with eachother in the healthcare sector despite the fact that most insurance companies have a "network" specifically so that they don't have to compete with eachother? How is healthcare a competitive market that drives towards efficiency exactly? The more you privatise healthcare the lower life expectancy you get and the higher you all pay!

If you think private healthcare is more efficient than single payer healthcare when EVERY PIECE OF DATA WE HAVE says the opposite then I think that says more about you than it does about the government.

Damn, you'd have to be completely brain dead to still believe anything is more efficient than single payer healthcare. The US has the worst outcomes for the highest cost in terms of life expectancy. Same with roads, utilities, schools etc... the more you privatise the more expensive things get for a lower quality product.

A well regulated, competitive market is good for many things, but for others it's atrocious. An unregulated market has never produced good outcomes on any scale larger than the board of directors.

If you're seriously summarizing the libertarian agenda then I can't believe any one over 14 could hold these ideas unless they were VERY sheltered from reality.

Oh my god YES. Don't accidentally snitch on someone doing you a solid.

Yeah getting dogs run over every 2 weeks, letting dogs bite people, burning plastic, running illegal drug dens.... These are definitely the kinds of freedoms we need to protect! The only problem is running motorcycles at night, that's where you draw the line apparently....