No idea about UK but in the US this one seems to be first to market and just got approved last year

They gave quite a bit more prisoners than they got in exchange, and now they are officially on the same team, so it’s all just new US and Israeli soldiers in the end

It was an exchange between two groups who are now effectively a part of the same military, the Islamic State of Syria. It was a part of them becoming allies.

Comparing that to two warring groups doing a prisoner exchange is totally disingenuous

There is a relatively new inhaler version called neffy that is typically $200 and last 2 years before expiring. It is still ridiculously expensive but worth looking into

SDF releasing ISIS prisoners, US says “we will still help you fight ISIS,” and I guess their strategy is to eliminate ISIS by hiring them to be in the Syrian military. I saw a guy with a shirt today that said “Punks for Rojava,” and I guess joining forces with ISIS is the most punk thing imaginable

Aside from what others have said, the US is a slave colony. Slaves are not allowed to leave. Having the largest prison population in the world requires a lot of walls! Kennedy said that quote during Jim Crow.

A voice at the end "I wish I had my gun with me, I’d do it "

I thought doomerism was more about climate change taking out most of humanity in the next 40 years and less about capitalism existing for 500 or 1000 years

having NATO and the US particularly leading your operations and providing you with billions of dollars of training and equipment must give some advantages

I imagine in this context the treaties don’t hold up because the US no longer exists, so it’s really just relocating settlers away from rural areas and letting indigenous people do whatever they want. There would need to be new rules and boundaries established due to climate change and the fact they many Indigenous nations don’t exist anymore or have been forced to leave their ancestral lands, but I think trying to relitigate old treaties is less elegant than other solutions

How else are they supposed to transition to green energy as quickly as they are? Extracting electricity directly from the human body is the cleanest energy possible

Imagine me making a joke about you thinking you know how to run China better than they do and you using it to further project your chauvinism.

Anyway, yes the same amount per person at a scale many orders of magnitudes higher is suddenly a different thing, something you can’t seem to wrap your head around. I guess your reading group missed the material part of dialectical materialism.

The process of uneven development in China is different than that of Cuba, but sure, continue to assert that because Cuba is doing something that means China is in a position to do the same thing.

Aside from the support Cuba relies on from China to provide what they provide, I really don’t think it should be easier to provide healthcare for 1.4 billion people versus 11 million. Your example of rural Chinese people with critical illnesses having medical debt is very specific context, and China’s system is locally funded so smaller rural areas have less funds.

It would be great for China to change to a single payer universal system but the cost of that alone would be larger than the GDP of many nations on Earth. It’s not as simple as “the government doing stuff”

edit: actually I just looked it up, in 2023 the total healthcare cost in China was 1,249,253,919,000.00 USD compare that to around 11-14 billion in Cuba.

this includes the out of pocket expenses that individuals have to pay. Thinking it would be simple for China to just pay all that for everyone right now seems pretty detached from reality to me, but maybe you can get hired by the PRC to balance their budgets

Yeah a small island nation is not the same as over a billion people, go figure. Cuba is like one neighborhood in Chongqing

You could move the settlers out of rural areas and return it to Indigenous stewardship/ allow it to rewild.

As it currently stands, most people in China buy their own insurance which is through the state and the care is primarily given through public providers. the easiest move would be to just have employers pay that insurance fee, or even a higher insurance fee that covers a higher amount of coverage since the public insurance doesn’t always cover all fees. since the insurance and providers are not profit driven, the prices remain affordable, but having the company take over paying for the employee is essentially a wage increase of the cost of the insurance.

some people say the state should just provide free healthcare for everyone, a “socialism is when the government does stuff” type position, but I think in the Chinese context having an entirely publicly owned insurance and healthcare provider scheme means access to quality healthcare is higher than in the US despite the large wealth disparity, and moving the burden of paying for the insurance directly to employers means that worker’s spending money goes up without losing any healthcare access, and corporate taxes can pay for other things instead of healthcare.

yeah he also did one of the first dropout presents specials, I think the first was hank green who honestly gives me the same feelings adam conover gives me.

Exactly, as it stands it is on the individual to pay for insurance themselves, making employers pay for it directly is better because it takes the burden off the individual and off the state. It would still be standardized through the state but funded by companies directly

I think in this case it could still be standardized through the state but the employer has to pay for it and guarantee it for a set period after firing an employee. It effectively just puts the burden of payment directly on the businesses and then the taxes they have to pay can go to other things Definitely an issue in capitalist states but I think China could do it differently

They need to raise the minimum wages and force companies of a certain size to provide healthcare, pensions, etc. This would resolve a lot of these issues