Country size has nothing to do with it; it's all in the lobbies.

Much of what's wrong with American healthcare could be fixed with a few pieces of federal legislation:

1. Any medical practitioner who deals with one health insurance provider has to deal with all of them. Likewise, all insurances have to accept bills from all licensed medical practitioners.
2. There are limits to how much can be billed for a certain procedure within the health insurance system.
3. There are limits to how much a health insurance is allowed to charge for the basic plan relative to income.
4. A health insurance's basic plan must cover at least a certain set of medical procedures (but is allowed to cover more). These include all regular life-saving procedures and a range of preventative ones (e.g. semiannual dental checkups).
5. Health insurances are not allowed to deny basic coverage due to pre-existing conditions.
6. Deductibles are banned.
7. Copays are regulated.

This gets rid of the "out of network" bullshit and basically turns the American healthcare system into an approximation of the German one. The German system is one of the most expensive in the world and generally considered to be of middling quality compared to other wealthy nations but it's half as expensive per capita as the American one; based on free enterprise (with a fuckton of regulations, which is normal for the medical sector); and wildly more effective than the American system, which doesn't even rank among other developed nations.

The only reason the USA don't have a better healthcare system is that lobbyists spend an unholy amount of money to ensure it doesn't and lawmakers are willing to do whatever the highest bidder tells them to. Size and diversity have nothing to do with it.

It's similar in Germany.

The CDU/CSU, our conservatives, huffed a bit too much of their own supply and had brilliant ideas like reducing the public deficit by reducing infrastructure spending to zero. When that somehow started costing them votes after bridges started to collapse they decided to lean wholesale into the culture war bullshit by "engaging" the hard-right AfD by copying their rhetoric wholesale. Oddly enough, all this does is legitimize the AfD and drive voters to them. Currently the chancellor is busy trying to find out how unpopular he can get before the government collapses, championing policies that would've instantly ended careers twenty years ago. (And yes, this includes cuts to the healthcare system and "cost-saving" measures that everyone agrees will drive up costs.)

The SPD, our social democrats, have essentially purged all of their social democrat members and are now a business-friendly rump party with no discernible character or platform. The Greens have softened their ecological policies to the point of pointlessness. The FDP, our libertarians, were always ready to harm the country to help the rich; the last time they were in office they were so blatant about it they destroyed the governing coalition and are now deeply despised.

The one traditional party that somehow moved in a positive direction was The Left, whose Russia fanboys tried to spin off into their own populist party, which then fizzled out. This, and the fact that they still somewhat care about what the label says, makes them the only ones who haven't fully enhsittified themselves.

Then there's the new boy on the block, the AfD. Positioning themselves as a moderate conservative worker's party, their actual policies only don't declare foreigners (and foreign-looking people) to be second-class humans because that spot is already reserved for Germans who aren't independently wealthy. Foreigners are somewhere below that. Due to an inexplicably effective social media presence and the general fecklessness of the established parties they're rising meteorically.

Notably, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution only hasn't designated the AfD as a known extremist organization because they immediately sued and the designation must be withheld until the suit is resolved. Several federal countries have designated them as threats to the democratic order. The CDU/CSU insists the can't possibly be banned, at first because they were too small, now because they're too big.

There are smaller parties that aren't yet self-serving empty husks but they generally don't have any chance of making it past the 5% hurdle because they don't have the weight of tradition or the equivalent of a billion Euro advertising budget behind them. I personally am somewhat partial towards the Humanists because they cite scientific papers for each of their policies. It's a nice break from the usual "our way is the only correct way because we say so". Too bad they'll probably never make it big.

Okay, the script failed to execute properly the first time around so I just didn't get the redirect. That made things a bit... cryptic and vaguely reminiscent of that old Onion "blood everywhere" story. Second time worked, though.

And oh shit, now that I see the story proper I actually remember this. Damn, that's a fine bit of web nostalgia. Thanks for bringing that back up (and for getting me to try it again).

So the repetitions of "something is terribly wrong" that start mid-sentence are intended that way? Sorry for suspecting an LLM; it does kinda feel like the output of an early (or badly misconfigured) LLM getting stuck on a token. Wouldn't be the first time LLMs have cribbed someone's style.

Damn those LLMs, they've even managed to ruin random internet bullshit! shakes fist at cloud computing

Nah, man. Barrel jumped Worf with no provocation. It's a loose cannon. You don't want a head of security with that kind of temper.

Are the rapidly increasing font size and the LLM-generated text about something being wrong with the site part of the experience or are they a creative way of fucking with people who run adblockers?

We could get a worldwide ban going but as long as any country with launch capabilities (like, say, the United States) decides not to join the ban we achieve nothing. And given how the States work, it's unlikely that they'd agree to such a ban.

With CFCs we had the benefit of having replacement chemicals available. Sure, they were somewhat less efficient than CFCs but they worked just fine.

(Also, some people still use them despite the ban. China has been shown to still be a CFC emitter although to a lesser degree than earlier.)

A ban or heavy restriction on LEO satellite constellations would render the whole high speed satellite internet business model useless. Sure, you can do it with higher orbits but that requires unacceptable tradeoffs. So you'd see much more pushback.

On the other hand, charging for environmental damage is kinda hard to work around. Sure, Musk can go cry to daddy Trump if the mean EU forces him to pay up. But Trump can't really do much except escalate the trade war for the thirtieth time.

Might be a good time for countries to start charging SpaceXAI (or however it's called these days) for their effect on the ozone layer.

If e.g. the EU estimates that it'll have to spend fifty billion euros a year dealing with the effects of LEO satellite constellations in the ozone layer then they should bill those fifty billion euros to the operating companies with each paying a proportion relative to how many satellites they have in LEO.

Likewise for every other country that has to deal with the effects of a diminished ozone layer. If that means SpaceX becomes deeply unprofitable then that's unfortunate for the investors.

They also serve to decentralize remembrance. A Holocaust memorial is good, yes, but it's in one place you're probably not going to go unless you want to. Stumbling stones can be randomly encountered while you go about your day and remind you that someone who had their life ruined once lived here.

That's precisely why right-wing politicians oppose them in favor of centralized memorials.

Fine them one million a day until the generators are done. That should motivate them a bit more.

Why? Plenty of dams are perfectly capable of producing power 24/7. It may not even be possible to let the reservoir fill up during the day and drain it during the night, especially during a drought or flood period where the amount of incoming water very much dictates what you do with your dam and when.

You make a lot of assumptions about how dams are operated. Those assumptions aren't always true.

Yeah; working tickets in a small company without seventeen layers of corporate bullshit feels so good.

You take a ticket. It contains information about the expected state of the product and how reality differs from that, relevant additional information, as well as information on who reported the bug/requested the feature. You start work on your task immediately because everything you need is right there. If you have questions you know exactly who to ask and how to reach them. Your bureaucratic overhead consists of a daily 15 minute standup with the other devs. The codebase may be a bit old-fashioned but is sensibly organized and reasonably easy to understand. Two days later you submit a merge request; the code review is done in another day and you set the task to done.

Now let's see how it goes in a corporation:

You join the one hour pre-refinement meeting and see a new PBI. The PBI contains a vague description of something that may or may not be your team's responsibility. While trying to turn the description into ACs you realize that it references an old version of the DOM so your architect has to talk to the operating department for clarification. Regardless, the PO points out that the issue is on a hard timer so the PBI passes through pre-refinement half-finished.

During the two hour refinement meeting the PBI has to be estimated based on the architect's best guess on what to do. You plasyx planning poker because you have to despite having no idea about how complex the task actually is. This is still very important for planning so you guess it's an 8. After this the team adds tasks to the PBI based on what you think needs to be done. These tasks contain no information beyond their titles.

Unfortunately, the PBI lands in your lap. While trying to make sense of the description and ACs you realize that it's impossible to understand without looking at the DOM, which requires you to launch Enterprise Architect and hope that you currently have access rights. After parsing a 125-element UML chart you ask your lead dev for help. He refers you to someone on another team but can't remember their name. You track them down and message them on Teams. A day later they actually respond and you can start working.

The codebase uses a hexagonal event-driven CQRS architecture with eventual consistency and ROP everywhere, which means that it's virtually impossible to step through the code and see where values actually come from. After wading through application-internal events that generate other application-internal events you finally realize that you made the mistake of relying on your IDE's "Find all references" functionality, which isn't reliable in a codebase as enterprisey meticulously engineered as yours. A repository-wide regex search finally leads you to the place where you need to make your change. One of them, that is; you also need to update three domain event handlers, two feed workers, twenty test classes, and a stored procedure in the database. This takes over a week, especially since in the meantime you also had your half-hour dailies, a 90 minute retrospective, a two-hour sprint planning session, a CAB advisory, weeklies for three workgroups you're in, and a joint review session.

Finally you submit your code and open a pull request. Azure DevOps fails to build your application because SonarQube complains that one method contains more then thirty statements. That method initializes a domain object with sixty-eight properties so it's probably okay. You log into SonarQube, which fails because SQ's Entra ID integration is flaky. After five attempts you finally get in and mark the method as "won't fix", which has been done twenty times already for this method. ADO still can't build your application because in the meantime the security team have made a small adjustment to the firewall which means that ADO can't talk to its build runners anymore. They promise a swift resolution.

As you log in the next day the runners still don't work but that's okay because neither does your dev VM. Or maybe it's the AVD session you have to dial into to connect to the dev VM. Either way, fifty other devs are also affected. The platform team promises a swift resolution. At 4 PM you can actually log into your VM again. The runners now work but the build's test cases fail because you forgot to tell the DBAs to deploy your stored procedure to the PROD and STAGE databases. You do so and the ticket gets a 48 hour SLA.

Five hours after the SLA has expired you ask the DBAs when they'll do your changes. They realize the changes are trivial and do it in five seconds. You restart the expired build pipeline and finally take your PR out of draft stage so your team can review it.

One reviewer notices that one of the integration tests is no longer as precise as desired after your changes and asks you to sit down with the team's QA engineer to completely refactor it. Simultaneously the PO asks you if the PBI needs to be moved to the next sprint; the pre-refinement meeting starts in five.