Black mirror is getting closer everyday

I’m in Georgia, they honestly could not care less. I’ve contacted them in the past about issues and they really did not care

Not sure if you are in the USA or Germany based on your URL but The general idea is that a private company should not have to hold the cards for our fate, and our health treatment. That’s what you are clearly missing. If you get chronically ill in some of the better parts of Europe, you won’t have any medical or financial consequences of that. Ambulance is don’t cost much of anything directly, hospital stays don’t cost you much. In the USA you cannot say the same. Going to the hospital for some major illness like cancer or emergency surgery could cost you anywhere from $15,000 to $200,000. Look up the cost of having a baby at a hospital especially when there are complications. It’s unbelievable.

The idea is that you should pay into a system that works for everyone, namely the government and taxes, and they help you out in return once you have a hardship at a low or no cost because you have been paying into it. This is not how insurance works. In most cases, you pay stupid amounts of money into insurance, and once the new year rolls around, you have lost your entire deductible and you’re out of pocket is completely reset. You have severe limitations on your FSA or health savings accounts so you can’t save enough money. Literally not allowed for you to save and stockpile lots of money for covering healthcare. You have to pay into this stupid for-profit company that doesn’t give a damn about you and will never lift a finger to help you. Sometimes people are lucky and benefit from the insurance. Those situations are extremely rare, and situations in which people are financially ruined by insurance and healthcare are far more common.

I’m glad that the system in place has worked for you currently. But that does not mean it works for everyone, and that’s something you need to understand. Just because something works for you doesn’t mean it’s a great system.

The Lemmy user base is so out of touch with the average consumer.

This is probably true. I don’t know many people who aren’t super heavy into tech, I’ve had a gaming PC half my life, but I do have a couple friends who don’t even have a laptop, PC, computer, or anything. They just have a phone. I don’t know how they get by.

No, actually, I did my own research on it

https://www.npr.org/2024/05/14/1251072726/ai-spam-images-facebook-linkedin-threads-meta

When researchers at Georgetown and Stanford universities investigated more than 100 Facebook pages that routinely post AI content — sometimes dozens of times a day — they found that many are engaging in scams and spam.

Other people have found the same conclusion that I have

Imo, this is most likely AI. Facebook and Instagram both have incredibly sophisticated spam preventative measures. These companies are likely using artificial intelligence to generate brand new and highly intelligent scripts that continuously change to evade spam detection tools. Same thing happened on Twitter (You can look at my post history for an example). There was a bot spamming on Twitter and it had run out of credits for GPT resulting in the AI instructions to start being spit out instead of the fake messages it was supposed to produce.

It wasn’t that bad several years ago, I remember during the pandemic, lots of people were interacting with each other. It gets progressively worse every year.

Seems to be especially bad in Georgia where there’s very poor access to healthcare. More progressive places like NY may have different results I’m not sure. It’s just shocking, no one will even consider helping me

And that’s probably why. Why they wouldn’t just say that, I don’t know. There are lots of places that will do transnasal esophagoscopy throughout the US, so it isn’t a procedure that is just “not done here” or anything, its not as popular in general because its just not as thorough of a procedure.

Here’s the exact wording I got from my Gastro in the USA in a major metro serving millions of people.

I have reached out to our gastroenterology department and have learned that we do not do this procedure. Additionally, we are not aware of anyone in the state of Georgia that offers it.

No one in the ENTIRE state of Georgia… does a Nasal Endoscopy or esophagoscopy, a common procedure all across the world. Truly asinine.

Honestly, I think this is not true, in my experience at least. I think suing doctors was a feature of the '90s and early 2000s, but now people are so poor they can’t afford lawyers to sue a doctor for them, and medical malpractice runs so rampant that doctors don’t even seem to care at all. Everyone has had a bad running with a doctor, yet you’re very unlikely to hear of someone who has sued a doctor and gotten away with it.

I know the sedation is not medically necessary, lots of places outside the USA don’t do it at all. Japan, Europe, etc. There’s research studies that even show non sedated procedures are being used and have been favorably received. Every single doctor I’ve asked about them, they outright refuse to do it without sedation or anesthesia. Guess how much that costs? Thousands of dollars, with insurance. So I have to pay about $5,000 at least out of pocket a year for insurance, then I have to pay $3,500 for this procedure, and the last two that I’ve gotten, they haven’t shown anything. So naturally I’m like okay, can we do a less invasive one without sedation, like they do in other countries? Absolutely not. We won’t do that, and we don’t know anyone else who will ever do it. Like what the hell is this?

can you block users by wildcard?

Nope. You also can’t prevent users from viewing your profile. It’s not like Facebook where you block someone, they’re gone and can’t even see you. On Reddit, they can see you, and just log onto another account to harass and downvote you.

This is a great explanation for why business deductions are stupid in the first place. Why does being profitable justify being even more profitable by paying fewer taxes?

Winner takes all, I guess? Amazon has been so successful they became a literal monopoly (don’t care to argue semantics of it, this is my opinion), and employs hundreds of thousands of people. They’re so successful that the impact of causing them to pay their fair share might impact the economy in a larger sense. So they just let them have way more freedoms than small businesses?

Seems like it’s completely subjective, too. I’ve seen many posts on reddit about people being shafted by the IRS and forced to pay back a ton in taxes even though it was a legit effort to run an actual business, simply because they don’t “think” it’s a business

Like, if you don’t know it’s closed

They literally stated that they knew it was closed

It takes three seconds to shake their head or say we’re closed something

The signage on the door explains the hours of operation, and the door is locked. Why should that have to be explained?

Wow. Do you at least get to like write it off of your taxes or something?

Honestly don’t see how they get away with this and don’t get sued into oblivion? Or why the justice system is letting this happen? Because when you start a non-profit and claim that you’re doing it for the public good, I thought there would be some sort of legal requirement that you’re actually doing that? Meta, which is a for-profit company, has chosen to release their AI models to the public for anyone to use, you can go get a copy of llama 3.1 right now to go and use all on your own and people are tweaking it and doing all these crazy open source changes to llama 3.1. It’s crazy.

All of these are really important policy changes that have positively impacted our society. How do you spark change to the effect of all these? I recently reached out to the Federal trade commission on one company that has some extremely predatory practices but don’t think that’ll do anything. What other methods can I use? Email congressman or something?

I spoke to a lawyer about something similar to this recently and he basically just laughed at me. Told me there is no way it’s worth it, would cost tens of thousands of dollars to fight it in court and would basically have no gain to me personally at all. Overturning such a small amount no matter how wrong or immoral it is would be extremely costly on both sides but they have way more money to throw at the issue than I do which I totally agree with honestly. So you can do something that’s totally immoral, just as long as you have tons of money behind you to pay for it

What you’re saying is just silly. “keep learning” there’s a point or ceiling where people can’t rise any higher or have hit their limit. AI doesn’t have this. You can download hundreds or thousands of pages of content, millions of files, and make it 2.5x smarter than you. They trained AI to take the bar exam and pass it. That has happened. I can’t just keep infinitely learning forever and advancing my career. There’s a point where you hit a ceiling and can’t go any higher.