• 0 Posts
  • 120 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 14th, 2023

help-circle



  • Glide@lemmy.catoMemes@lemmy.mlJust the tip
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    7
    ·
    edit-2
    6 days ago

    Hey, let’s not discredit the amazing work that Brian Thompson accomplished as CEO! Before his joining UnitedHealthCare in 2022, their denial rate was 8%. Then, only one short year later, he managed to successfully drive that denial rate up to almost 28%! As the UnitedHealthCare conglomerate served some 122 million Americans that year, you can easily discern that Brian Thompson was directly responsible for ensuring that ~24 million Americans had their claims denied. Imagine how much less UHC would have made for their investors if they had to pay an addition 24 million American’s health care claims!

    So before giving all the credit to the board members and share holders, let’s take a moment to understand exactly how hard Brian Thompson worked to ensure some ~24 million Americans went without doctor-approved medical support that they previously were entitled to.

    All this data is publically available on Wikipedia, by the way.




  • Denying and delaying health care is wrong. And while I think that murder shouldn’t be a desired solution to the problem as it is also wrong, at this point we have to accept that we’ve reached systematic self-defense.

    Something needs to change, and there are currently no motivating factors encouraging those with the power to make change. I don’t want the answer to be violence, but, genuinely, what other options do we have at this point? The courts, the Democratic process, the police and the economy all work together to protect the massive wealth of the few, and we live in a world run by that wealth. I don’t want to hurt anyone, but more than that, I don’t want anyone to be hurt. When the few in power choose to hurt the many without, tolerance for the gaps in power, wealth, and quality of life give way.


  • and I wouldn’t necessarily be against the state holding to account executives who have produced systems and policies that result in the harm or death of the state’s citizens

    Right, except if everything went exactly correctly as per the current justice system, the company would be found at fault, fined an absurd amount of money and closed. The wealthy executives who made the decisions that actually resulted in country-wide deaths would get sizable severance packages, take a short vacation, and 6 months to a year later open up the same business under a new name that imposes the same policies. It’ll be right back to throwing poors into a furnace to fuel their lamborgini’s until the next slap on the wrist.

    We have no system to hold people accountable for their decisions as part of a company. We blame the company and then trust the company to police their staff accordingly. I’d love a widespread rework of the justice system to actually target the people responsibly for a companies actions, but we won’t get one, so instead, someone has been shot.








  • Undertale is such a bolt of lightning. It both depends on its player having experience with traditional JRPG and having no fucking clue what it is. But when the conditions line up, as it did for many people at release, it was such a master fully crafted experience. But even the slightest amount of “it’s good because…” really siphons part of the experience away.





  • My experience with GOG is that it is a fringe option, at least in the combined North American (USA+Canada) culture. Plus, the unfortunate reality is that in many cases GOG’s principles preclude it from being a genuine competitor to Steam. Insisting on being DRM free means half of released games never go to the platform, so it will always be the secondary “better if” option.

    I worry about Steam’s functional monopoly on PC game access. It hasn’t been an issue so far, because it has remembered that it is, first and foremost, a service, providing consumer protection through a generous refund policy and supporting devs with easy access to simple matchmaking and anti-cheat systems. But without a healthy competitor, it would be easy for Steam to start milking it’s users and developers alike.