My econ 101 professor once said “what are the things that even the most anti-government people say the government needs to do? Emergency services.” Then these dense motherfuckers came along to outdo even that.
Internet libertarians & off-the-rails conservatives unironically say EMS and Fire Departments should be privatized. Ancaps go one step further and say police and sometimes even military should be private. It makes me lose hope in voters, until I remember that I was 15 before too and most people surely grow out of that phase. But there’s a few people who are fully adult-aged who still believe that which is kind of sad for them I guess
They tried this with firefighters before way back when, and then realized that fire doesn’t seem to care who’s subscribed or not lol. Can you imagine? “The fire and EMS lobby” would be powerfully pushing for reduced safety and maybe even starting fires themselves LOL.
EDIT: Link went to NYT because it was top result, but screw that lol. Fixed.
I can see it now though…
Privatized emergency services be like:
“Thank you for calling 9-1-1, this is Janeanniesomebody, can I have your 14-digit emergency insurance number, date of birth, and mother’s maiden name please. Okay thank you, one moment while I verify that…” (Click)
"Your call is very important to us. Want to skip the line when it matters most? Did you know, for only $49.97 a month, you can get Emergency-Services-Plus+! Whether you want help fast, or to regret being covered for the rest of your life, we have a plan right for YOU!
“Remember, emergency insurance means you can have peace of mind that, when you’re in mortal danger, we’re only a phone call and 45-minutes-to-1-business-day away! Not signed up yet? Press 1, and we can help!”
((Trendy upbeat hold music))
“Did you know? We’re always hiring!”
(Receiver pickup) “Thank you for calling this is Devaidengregjimmothy, dispatch specialist, how can I help you today? Hello?..Hello?..”
Cassius from the tail end of the roman republic famously was the richest man in Rome and owned the “fire brigade”. When a fire broke out he would only put it out after the owner agreed to sell the place for next to nothing.
I don’t know why you’re being downvoted, that’s the account. It probably didn’t happen, but it made a great story. The greediest, richest man in Rome bought an army and was made to drink what he craved most when he failed. Poetic justice.
Side note, Crassus was an experienced military man who fought under Sulla, and put down Spartacus’ rebellion. But he was no general, treated legionnaires under his command with brutal discipline, even using the mostly outdated decimation (if a unit failed, or dishonored themselves, they were forced to beat every tenth man in the unit to death as punishment. )
The only reason he invaded Parthia was that he was envious of Pompey and Caesar’s respect amongst the plebes (common citizens, i.e. peasants.) Military conquests were a sure way to gain respect in Roman culture, and to amass fortunes in slaves and booty.
I don’t know why you’re being downvoted, that’s the account. It probably didn’t happen, but it made a great story. The greediest, richest man in Rome bought an army and was made to drink what he craved most when he failed. Poetic justice.
Yes, I know ; there are a few stories of his death, some mutually exclusive. The most popular is the version that he was beheaded, “gold-fed” and his head used instead of cabbage in a theatrical play, the place is disputed too, most likely Ecbatana or Susa, but there’s also a version of that happening in Artaxata (matches the premise where it’s said that he didn’t listen to Artavazd’s warning out of his pride, and then Artavazd decided to “betray” Crassus by remaining loyal to Parthia).
I think I’ve heard a version of him being overfed with meat and fat and made drink cold water, thus dying ; well, I don’t know if it’s even a working way to execute someone.
Firefighters were literally private companies before we collectively decided it was a bad idea. Firefighters would just sit and watch a place burn if nobody payed up. Sometimes rival firefighters would even get in brawls over who gets the contract while the house was burning down beside them.
They’re municipally operated here and we actually had a case a few years back where a small town that couldn’t reasonably afford to operate their own fire department needed to make arrangements with a nearby larger town to have fire emergency response services cover them.
The larger town said sure, $50 per year per home. Small town had 63 people, but some refused to pay. Fire department said they weren’t going to keep track of which houses were and were not covered, so they had to all be on board or none of them would be.
Naturally a home later caught fire and burned to the ground. Thankfully no one was inside at the time.
if memory serves, the first fire fighters were in Rome and owned by rich people. If you didn’t pay them to put out the fire, their boss would buy the ashes from you afterwards.
Somewhat predictably they also started the first public firefighting force after a large part of the city burned down, again. Apparently prevention is just not profitable if you’re only paying people to extinguish fire.
Didn’t prevent what is now known as the Great Fire of Rome though.
You are most likely not able to reason why ancap ideology is bad or why your own ideology is good. Which is why you should show more respect to people who are trying to reason in either direction. Their opinion, no matter which direction specifically that is, is worth something.
Specifically ancap ideology is attractive for me exactly because it requires one to imagine very specific architectures of how things would work, so - to reason their position. I’ve been following one ancom channel in TG, because they were posting many interesting articles about tackling the same problems ancaps want to tackle. And as you may know, ancaps and ancoms don’t like each other.
Both ancap and ancom ideologies are simply better than all the rest, because they don’t ignore the problem of compromised institutions.
Once again, your opinion is worth as much as you personally can support it with logic. Being part of a crowd doesn’t mean attaining the intelligence or the authority of somebody else in that crowd. These things don’t transfer. So your tone makes only you personally look immature and stupid.
I mean I am basically a feudal lady but even I know this whole capitalistic mess is toxic for mind, soul and environment. How you want that but dialled to 11 is beyond me.
It would end in actual feudalism as in few people amassing goods, land, resources and ruling over the masses as kings with their monopolies and monetising air you breathe or the like. Killing you for disobedience in some private execution using private justice system keeping u in check with private militia.
The only thing between that reality and current is government with its anti monopoly laws, taxes, protection of basic amenities and wealth redistribution. Of course countries vary here.
Ancapitalism is probably one of the most stupid systems you can invent as it basically deconstructs itself as one individual amasses so much wealth they become a de facto king ruling over everything with absolute power destroying the system that helped them amass such power.
It is sad to see someone crazy enough to advocate for such system that isn’t even possible to exist long term and leads to feudalism very fast.
Not many people are insane enough to want RUST game irl unironically
Sorry, I see no value in this text because it wrongly assumes that ancap is about abolishing rules.
Ancap is about determining a specific functional set of rules and functional architecture to support it.
It’s about evaluating forces and feedbacks in human societies and economies and designing a system where people are impeded in using power to enforce their vision upon other people.
That is why central authority and state are a problem - there are never backup mechanisms that you can switch to once the main one stops working correctly, and many people want this, because they want to capture that mechanism and enforce their will upon others. So even attempts to create backup mechanisms are met with resistance by crowds of fools who think that their favorite faction is the closest to capturing the main one and making others do something, and by people with power, who, of course, exist just as well despite that being ideologically inconvenient for you.
The problem of someone eventually amassing too much power is not being solved by existing states any better than in ancap.
Thus ancaps are trying to design systems as decentralized as possible for human societies. So that there always would be backup mechanisms to run away to.
EDIT: If this is too abstract, that’s because ancap as an ideology is defined by these criteria and not by specific solutions. And that’s right, if an ideology puts its set of solutions above the goals, then it’s a religious cult.
People like this are always talking about how things should be without understanding that the world doesn’t run on ‘should’ and most people don’t want what they’re selling.
OK, the other comment was bored, lazy and not very sincere.
Ancapitalism is probably one of the most stupid systems you can invent as it basically deconstructs itself as one individual amasses so much wealth they become a de facto king ruling over everything with absolute power destroying the system that helped them amass such power.
No. To learn about ancap, go to ancaps and not to non-ancaps writing about ancaps.
It would end in actual feudalism as in few people amassing goods, land, resources and ruling over the masses as kings with their monopolies and monetising air you breathe or the like. Killing you for disobedience in some private execution using private justice system keeping u in check with private militia.
No, because ancap is not the same as anarchy by Hobbes.
Your reading comprehension must suck because you completely incorrectly read the sentence you’re obsessing over. There are so many of you ancaps (almost entirely clueless teenagers) online that it becomes tiring to debunk your stupid ideology over and over again. If you can’t see why a system based around capital – where you vote with your capital and people with more capital have more votes, where resources are distributed based on capital and capital itself is a resource – is inherently flawed, then that’s completely on you. If you want leftists to educate you, then you can support the education reforms they’re advocating for, not go on Lemmy and beg for them to personally tutor you. But I guess you’re still in high school so that’s not exactly something you’re old enough to do.
Ancaps are pathetic, there is no reason to seriously engage every single one you see. They live in a fantasy world where charity replaces taxes and systematic discrimination & deepseated cultural biases are solved by the “free market”, and pollution & climate change (if you even think it’s an issue) are solved by future techbros which will totally invent stuff to completely unfuck the planet asap (or something something they’ll totally be stopped when people realize it violates the NAP). They also live in a fantasy world where capital isn’t used to “compromise the institutions” as you say you’re worried about. You can try to slither your way into anarchist discourse all you like and try to gain their acceptance, but it is not happening.
No. You may imagine you’ve defeated someone or debunked something. Bye
EDIT: “If you want leftists to educate you” - definitely not. “Ancaps are …” - you are not qualified to talk about ancaps instead of ancaps themselves.
The fact that your resolve immediately crumbles when you have to think about the logic of your ideology even a tiny bit says a lot about the number of years you have left until you graduate from high school
And yet almost no one wants to live in the world those people have presented to everyone. Should they be forced to?
You responded:
If I can be forced to live in the world you like more
Clearly you can be forced to live in that world because you are forced to live in that world.
then yes
So I asked you how you would force everyone to live like that and you suddenly turned around and said this wasn’t about everyone, just you and your friends.
My entire job is using Scala, Rust, and Haskell, and I can guarantee that you have no fuckin idea what you’re on about. Like what even is that supposed to mean lmfao, you think monads will save your capitalism? Will you utilize lazy iterators to destroy the left wing? Did you just want to sound intellectual by using a random math term?
Well, I didn’t see which exact insult you wrote to be deleted by mods (I value their support emotionally, but frankly would prefer to replace all “deleted by mod” cases with “hidden by mod” to see what’s been posted if I want), but laziness in functional programming is not limited to lazy iterators. I meant lazy evaluations, as in Lisp. If that still doesn’t make sense to you, please postpone answering by 8-10 hours.
Actually whatever lemmy.world admins use to auto-ban malfunctioned and was banning a bunch of users for “URL Blacklist” coincidentally when I posted the comment. I’m glad that you thought it was a long ban though and that I wouldn’t be able to respond because now I can point and laugh at what you just said
but laziness in functional programming is not limited to lazy iterators. I meant lazy evaluations, as in Lisp.
Man you really just fucking Googled “laziness programming definition” and regurgitated words from the first Wikipedia article you saw? I’m curious how you’re going to try to weasel your way of of that and somehow connect lazy evaluation to however you were responding to that person. Because if you actually knew what the hell lazy evaluation was then you would know how stupid you sound right now. Let me guess, you won’t even attempt to because you realize trying to explain would make you look even more clueless.
What is obvious is that you saw the words “functional programming” online one time and thought “you should learn functional programming” sounded like a fancy way of saying “you should learn logic” so you used it without having a clue as to what you were even talking about. The most stereotypical ancap pseudo-intellectualism I’ve seen!
Man you really just fucking Googled “laziness programming definition” and regurgitated words from the first Wikipedia article you saw?
In my language what I said looked fine in this context and I’d be understood. In your language it’s still fine because a person arguing in good faith starts with assuming that the problem is with them, and the rest are not worth worries.
Since I well know what lazy evaluations are, I am using them correctly, for the analogy that another person should have separated two arguments I’ve made (EDIT: as in “evaluating one is not necessary to evaluate another referring to it”).
So it is clear for any spectator, competent or not, that you are a fool. Except some of them are the same.(EDIT2: removed for pettiness as well, found mentions of ADHD and, well, ADHD people usually seek arguments not to humiliate others, so I’m changing my interpretation)
I didn’t “think it was a long ban”, I thought the specific comment got removed for some reason and I asked you to postpone continuation for 8-10 hours because I’d rather not test my willpower to not argue with fools in that timespan.
I also think you are incompetent at your job, because people use informal language all the time to talk about concepts. (EDIT: this is petty, removed)
In my language what I said looked fine in this context and I’d be understood.
Haha no fucking way you’re trying to use “in my language it’s different” in this context. What language? What language could you possibly even be referring to? Is this language in the room with us right now?
Since I well know what lazy evaluations are, I am using them correctly, for the analogy that another person should have separated two arguments I’ve made. So it is clear for any spectator, competent or not, that you are a fool. Except some of them are the same.
You saying “I’m right and your wrong because… because I know I’m right!” is certainly an argument. I guess I was correct about you not being able to come up with actual reasoning for the bullshit you tried pulling.
I also think you are incompetent at your job, because people use informal language all the time to talk about concepts.
What kind of pseudointellectual oral diarrhea is this? “Informal language”? You think anyone actually believes the bullshit you’re making up about “lazy evaluation” being “informal language” for something else in your language?
Are you in 10th grade or something? You sound so unbelievably dumb right now trying to make justifications for your stupidity up on the fly and failing horribly.
“I realize me trying to use terms I don’t know the meaning of in an argument makes me look stupid now to people who actually have knowledge about the subject, so I’m going to make a short and quippy comment to avoid trying to address my incompetently made claims and hope the other person lets me have the last word, or else I’m going to continue arguing because it would hurt my ego if they got to have the last word.” That is how you look to everyone else. Ancaps are very predictable. How many times have you tried to mic drop people today so far?
Most ideologies require you only to bunch together and yell louder. Ancap is not suited for that, which is why it’s cool.
Then why the fuck do I constantly see Ancaps doing this?
I’ve literally never actually seen an ancap successfully practice their ideas. I’ve only ever seen them desperately fail trying, or loudly exclaiming that they’re the smartest and bestest and all their ideas are golden (ignore the fact they’ve never even tried to put them In place, just loudly yelled complaining about the world they exist in like cats).
I’ve literally never actually seen an ancap successfully practice their ideas.
There is a community in Montenegro I know of trying to do that. It hasn’t yet desperately failed. It’s Russian, so may not fit you.
I also fuzzily remember a group of people planning of another such place like 10 years ago, but I stopped following them.
or loudly exclaiming that they’re the smartest and bestest and all their ideas are golden (ignore the fact they’ve never even tried to put them In place, just loudly yelled complaining about the world they exist in like cats).
How is this different from any kind of leftists except tankies?
I also fuzzily remember a group of people planning of another such place like 10 years ago, but I stopped following them.
A group near me completely failed after their town was overrun by bears because the abolished the trash/recycling rules and the animal control department.
How is this different from any kind of leftists except tankies?
Literally every single leftie has a larger history of putting their ideology into practice, seen or heard of a welfare state? Democratic Socialists and Social Democrats probably built it. Every nation on earth has a Dem Soc or Soc Dem major party.
Hell even the other anarchists have spent the past century building communes literally everywhere, and they’re the second most ineffective political group after Ancaps.
A group near me completely failed after their town was overrun by bears because the abolished the trash/recycling rules and the animal control department.
Well, incompetence sucks.
Literally every single leftie has a larger history of putting their ideology into practice, seen or heard of a welfare state? Democratic Socialists and Social Democrats probably built it. Every nation on earth has a Dem Soc or Soc Dem major party.
Of course it’s larger, ancap is from 1960s.
So non-ancap nations influenced by ancap count?
Hell even the other anarchists have spent the past century building communes literally everywhere, and they’re the second most ineffective political group after Ancaps.
Because ancaps exist for less than a century.
I guess you won’t call cryptocurrencies a success of ancap ideology.
If you only read Rothbard and his ilk, it did. But just like Marxism had thousands of years of proto-projects and inspiration, the thought behind Ancap has been around in practice for centuries.
So non-ancap nations influenced by ancap count?
The only countries to be ideologically pure in anything have been hellscapes, so I’d say being inspired is probably the best example you can get.
I guess you won’t call cryptocurrencies a success of ancap ideology.
You literally had to recreate centralized exchanges for crypto to succeed, and through that, you rebuilt everything that’s wrong with traditional currency but transferred the control from democracies to private citizens.
If you only read Rothbard and his ilk, it did. But just like Marxism had thousands of years of proto-projects and inspiration, the thought behind Ancap has been around in practice for centuries.
Not that much. Maybe Catholic distributivism and, eh, early USA.
The only countries to be ideologically pure in anything have been hellscapes, so I’d say being inspired is probably the best example you can get.
OK, then it’s hard for me to draw a border between something being ancap-inspired and generally right-liberal. Ancap is extreme voluntarism. The name is wrong, it’s not about capitalism, but capitalism results from it.
You literally had to recreate centralized exchanges for crypto to succeed, and through that, you rebuilt everything that’s wrong with traditional currency but transferred the control from democracies to private citizens.
I didn’t mean that as an achievement of ancap, it’s an utter (mostly technical, but still) failure. Just that it’s clearly influenced by that ideology.
They sure do want us all to live in a world where you have to swipe your credit card to drive anywhere, to go into a store, to walk anywhere, to use a public bathroom, to call 911, to use any services at all.
But I guess it will be worth it, because I’m sure the ancaps and libertarians and sovcits have a really good plan to keep each of us wealthy enough that privatizing the entirety of civilization won’t harm anyone.
I’ve published a simillar app to the play store (a calculator for keeping track of your stats in a game) and it got denied because it had no privacy policy, and I had to add one. Maybe that’s why they need to include it?
I would believe that but I’m pretty sure this is the default Google calculator. It looks like the same one that’s on my Pixel. And when I click on the privacy policy thing it takes me to Google’s privacy policy so who knows what the calculator is doing.
Then perhaps it’s because Google should follow their own rules? I mean, I still think it’s dumb to have a privacy policy on a calculator, but if that’s what they ask from other devs maybe they do this to look good?
Otherwise, getting tracked by a calculator is really a low 😅
Yeah I really hope this is just them following the rules and instead of putting in the work hours for their lawyers to make a privacy policy for their calculator they just have a standard one they use and not them using the calculator to gather data. But it is Google so I wouldn’t be surprised.
Me too. I just got some pens at work I actually like and I am hoarding them all for myself. I put them in my work bag so they’re just mine. They improve my handwriting but not much.
My handwriting has been terrible my whole life, even when I used to write in notebooks all the time. It doesn’t help that I’m left-handed and our alphabet is designed for right-handed people.
Corpse size has a lot to do with it. I wouldn’t swim in even a large pool with a dead human in it (knowingly), but one dead fish or rodent or dozens of dead tadpoles or bugs? Not an issue.
Heck, most household swimming pools have dozens of dead bodies in them, but they’re 99% insects.
Fingernails aren’t flesh; there’s no such thing as a dead fingernail because there’s no such thing as a live fingernail. It’s like shed hair floating in the pool; kinda gross, sure, but not dead body gross
The whole premise of this meme is a bit silly. If there was a corpse floating near the beach, I think most people might wait for the corpse to be removed, and perhaps even a reasonable cause of death to be determined, before entering the local area. The same is true for pools.
People fantasize about going back in time to kill baby Hitler. By all measures Trump would like to be a new Hitler and his most fervent supporters see him as that. Is it surprising people would support such an action to stop him?
I don’t know if you’re being sarcastic but I talked to a friend last night who lives in Mississippi and he said that he talks to people who think that Trump is legit a good Christiana and a good person.
Dunno much about it, I’m not american, but at what I could find with a quick online search, it looks pretty awful. Looks nowhere near the control you’d need for a dictatorship.
Not only is it terrible, it’s an actual threat to democracy.
I don’t know how anyone is surprised though. When you use words like “Nazi” and “existential threat” and “threat to our democracy” it can’t be a shock when someone tries to become a historic hero for taking out the supposed next Hitler, and people who buy into that propaganda language are going to cheer them on and want more of it. They’re frothing at the mouth, imagining they’re on the right side of history.
I get what the Dems are trying to do with pushing that language, but it really is playing with fire. It was a 50/50 chance that they could get him ineligible to run, alive or dead, and they’ve lost each bet.
OceanSoap being loaded into the train car: “Ok guys, any minute now will be the prime opportunity to stop these fascist guys. Just remember to consider both sides, they might have a really good reason for taking us out to this isolated camp.”
Calling the traitorous self-serving felon that caused an actual attack on the government and the Democratic process “a threat to democracy” seems tame, honestly. And that’s not even getting into his promises to jail political opponents, be a dictator on day one, suspend the constitution, call the free press an enemy of the people, and claim absolute authority and absolute immunity.
But then that whole political group also seems convinced that a barely progressive status quo “let’s work together” administration is literally totalitarian tyranny.
On top of that, if trump would have been killed, there is technically nothing stopping the US from postponing elections, coming up with an intermediate solution to have a functioning government without a D. president (like, no appointing of judges and such) and then have an election next year when the Republicans had enough time to find a new candidate.
If trump pushes through the things he said he’d do and what his supporters are supporting like project 2025, there’s a real chance that there are no actually democratic elections in 2028. And this is ignoring the fact that gerrymandering and the electoral college are already questionable and regularly abused by or benefit Republicans the most.
I see republican voters shooting republican candidates as pretty much reasonable outcome rather than some newly emergent threat to democracy. Trump made his image himself, it was him who decided to harass miniorities and brag about reading Mein Kampf often. It was him who made republican message extreme, provoked an insurrection, had all those criminal charges and appointed obviously corrupt judges. He groomed americans into feeling insecure and threatened and radicalized a lot of them. I think random depressed kids trying to suicide by shooting him is the least he should expect, especially seeing that USA has a gun cult focused around right to bear arms against threats to democracy. Also a child rapist, which alone is enough for millions of people to pull the trigger. You’re seriously blaming his bad image on anyone else?
Right, sorry, it was his wife that outed him for having Hitler speeches book “My New Order” back in 1990, which he apparently kept in a cabinet next to his bed. In the interview he also admitted having a copy of Mein Kampf, though he never openly claimed to read that book often. When he quoted Hitler in 2023 he said it was just a coincidence. Which caused no one to feel uneasy, no one at all. His former chief of staff claimed that Trump praised Hitler for doing some good things, like rebuilding the economy.
So right, sorry, I mixed the “Mein Kampf” for “My New Order”, and it was his wife that outed that, he only confirmed.
Do you have a source for Biden paying off that kid?
Also, Trump should serve time for the financial crimes he committed outside of being president. Him being in prison wouldn’t be that much of an issue for a lot of his fans
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