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Mrs Whiggins

By Mrs Whiggins
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I'd just like to point out that neither myself nor any of my fellow nurses, fellow advanced nurse practitioners, and other healthcare providers ever swore an oath that we would lay down our lives for

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Welp, it finally happened. I snapped in public today. I went into work for a bit this morning because I’m trying to figure out the safest way to host physicians we are recruiting given our CV-19 sit

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I don't really know what to say anymore tbh. What happened last night is hard to put into words for anyone who hasn't worked in a hospital healthcare setting. Just unreal. Everyone is getting fucked.

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gmr548

gmr548 16702

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3 hours ago, tchookem said:
4 hours ago, gmr548 said:
In terms of corruption, inequality, social mobility, and living conditions for the poor, America is starting to look more like Mexico or Brazil than what is usually considered our peer group, the rest of the west. USA is still among the best places in the world to be top quartile or so. Anything below that and the reality changes quite a bit. We are absolutely approaching third world levels of inequality.

Not tryng to argue, I definitely agree that income/opportunity inequity had been ignored for far too long. But I wouldn't mind doing some more research on the topic. Are there any studies you guys have read on the topic? There was an petty informative article bouncing around about the topic, anyone got anything else?

An academic study? No, I haven't. I am sure it's been pursued to some extent. There's existing publicly available data out there to track this sort of thing anyway. 

The US has fallen behind Canada, Western Europe, AUS/NZ, and Japan in terms of life expectancy since the mid 80s. While exact rankings very by source, the US is usually around 40 or so in the world, with peers such as Lebanon, Cuba, Panama, Brunei, and central/eastern European former communist states. Until 2019, US life expectancy had actually declined for four consecutive years. I believe that's mostly attributed to the opioid epidemic. In the 2018 UN report, the 3+ year gap between the US and Canada is similar to the gap between the US and Brazil or Vietnam. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expectancy

The Gini coefficient is a measure of inequality. Among OECD (basically the first-world economies club), the US is near the back at  a 0.39 (where 1.0 is basically one person having all wealth and 0 is perfect equality), between Lithuania and Turkey. Only slightly above, the UK (0.36), so there's that, but generally as close or closer to Mexico and Chile (0.46) than the rest of the major western economies (France and Germany 0.29, Canada 0.31, Italy and Australia 0.33, Japan and Spain 0.34). https://data.oecd.org/chart/5O5t

To be fair, Gini data is hard to compare because often the most recently reported year varies between countries, though I doubt the US has trended any better than those economies in terms of income equality since 2016/17. Income inequality-adjusted human development index, which is also UN-published, is a little kinder - the US gets all the way up to #28. Our nearest peers are still former communist states in Poland and Slovakia, who we trail slightly, but we do at least get above Mediterranean European countries like Spain, Italy, and Greece. Still cannot sniff the nordic states, Germany, UK, Japan, etc. though. The gap between Germany and the US is equal to the gap between the US and Russia or Montenegro.

There is of course the eyeball test. Just look at homelessness in major american cities or the abject rural poverty in Appalachia and the south. That shit does not exist in the rest of the west. Not nearly at that pervasive scale anyway. And the fact that the top insert tiny fraction - 0.1 percent, 1 percent, whatever - has been increasing it's income/wealth wildly since the 80s, while the 10-20 percent group is basically breakeven with inflation, and lower than that has lost purchasing power... That's obviously well documented and widely reported. 

So, yeah. America is obviously a massive economy and it is a very good place to be an educated, upper middle class professional or higher on the food chain. Below that, we have the health and opportunity indicators of the better-off former Soviet client states or a larger Latin American economy.

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elfenix

elfenix 34754

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1 hour ago, gmr548 said:

There is of course the eyeball test. Just look at homelessness in major american cities or the abject rural poverty in Appalachia and the south. That shit does not exist in the rest of the west. Not nearly at that pervasive scale anyway. And the fact that the top insert tiny fraction - 0.1 percent, 1 percent, whatever - has been increasing it's income/wealth wildly since the 80s, while the 10-20 percent group is basically breakeven with inflation, and lower than that has lost purchasing power... That's obviously well documented and widely reported. 

So, yeah. America is obviously a massive economy and it is a very good place to be an educated, upper middle class professional or higher on the food chain. Below that, we have the health and opportunity indicators of the better-off former Soviet client states or a larger Latin American economy.

 

there's a little exercise you do in the first week of economics class in high school.  it goes like this: the teacher will give you and a classmate $10 to split, but only if you can agree on the split.  you get to decide what the split is, the other can only accept or reject.  accept, and you get the split you proposed. reject, and you both get nothing.  most kids that haven't come across this problem will split it 50/50, but the economists will offer the other student a buck (or less), and the other will take it, because having a dollar is better than not having a dollar, even if the other walks away with $9. 

we've set up society like this so that a few of the kids in class are coming out with $9.99 while others get a penny.  and that's only considering the economic side of things, and forgetting that to make that $10 for society there are externalities which eat up a lot of that $10, and which largely fall on the kids getting pennies.

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Royalfan5

Royalfan5 2384

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So the effects of this on voting coming forward, based on mail in requests so far for Next months primary in Nebraska turnout will blow away a normal primary, and there ain’t shit on the ballot this year except Democratic primary’s, which are usually irrelevant here. 

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workswithseed

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4 hours ago, Ghost of LL said:

That just speaks to the real issue: the conservative movement is dead.  Everything conservatives once professed to support--free trade, an internationalist foreign policy, balanced budgets, anti-corruption--have no place in the Trumpublican Party.

So there's really no point in discussing right-versus-left.  That's no longer the driving divergence in American politics.  

False, the conservative movement has changed. It's weird since conservatives have always been called war hawks and accused of policing the world. Well they got tired of it, and decided to change that. 

Trump putting tariffs on other countries than China is just stupid. Other than that, conservatives have finally seen the light, that Nixon was wrong about China and should have let them fall like the USSR. 

Libertarian part of the conservative party still thinks so. Obviously Trumpkins hold power but that doesn't mean it's dead. That is no different than saying that the Labour Party is dead after it's resounding defeat by the Conservative Party in the UK.

I do think it's funny that before hand Democrats didn't care about corruption in your sentence, but conservative did. It's how I read that, but it's probably not how you meant it.

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Hiphopopotamos

Hiphopopotamos 21192

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1 minute ago, Irwin F Fletcher said:

What a fucking shit show. I love the push back the press is giving him.

Its like they're just now realizing that all of the 'norms' have gone out the window and that they can get him to lost his shit by just by doing the bare-minimum of push-backs.

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DigDug

DigDug 1738

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7 minutes ago, SameSame said:

Say hi to Karen!

You know none of want to see people go, but when you jump into a raging river while shooting everybody the double bird and saying Fuck off Libtards!! You can't stop my righteous freedom...well you get what you get.

Unfortunately in this case, the water you splashed up is reaching out and pulling more people into the river.  

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Ghost of LL

Ghost of LL 15699

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10 minutes ago, workswithseed said:

False, the conservative movement has changed. It's weird since conservatives have always been called war hawks and accused of policing the world. Well they got tired of it, and decided to change that. 

Trump putting tariffs on other countries than China is just stupid. Other than that, conservatives have finally seen the light, that Nixon was wrong about China and should have let them fall like the USSR. 

Libertarian part of the conservative party still thinks so. Obviously Trumpkins hold power but that doesn't mean it's dead. That is no different than saying that the Labour Party is dead after it's resounding defeat by the Conservative Party in the UK.

I do think it's funny that before hand Democrats didn't care about corruption in your sentence, but conservative did. It's how I read that, but it's probably not how you meant it.

It's not that conservatives "got tired of" "policing the world."  It's that the Trumpublican Party completely abandoned the internationalism that was one of the cornerstones of the conservative movement.

And Nixon wasn't wrong about China.  Nixon opening China was part of what cause of the USSR to fall.  Exploiting the wedge between China and the Soviet Union was one of the great victories of American diplomacy.

Finally--you have a real limited understanding of history if you don't appreciate the role anti-corruption used to have in the conservative movement.  Large city machine politics--e.g., Tammany Hall, the Daley machine in Chicago--were generally creatures of the Democratic Party.  Part of what underpinned the conservative movement was a drive toward transparency and government accountability.  And now that's completely gone.  The Trumpublicans have embraced corruption on a scale that would've caused Boss Tweed to blush in embarrassment.  

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Grade of D as in David

Grade of D as in David 13255

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3 minutes ago, Nivek said:

I wish they would go after him harder.  Really call him out of his incompetence.  Don't let him set the narrative or control the conversation.  Interrupt the cuck and talk over him.  

They aren't going after him hard enough.

Shit no one has even thrown a shoe at him yet.

let george bush GIF

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SameSame

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10 minutes ago, Red Five said:

He keeps blasting other countries for how bad they’ve handled this. I wonder if anyone has shown him our numbers.

This isn't about the virus anymore or the country's well being, not that it ever really was, these are full on Trump campaign rallies.

That's all this nonsense is. It's just bullshit.

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