The issue is the price gouging still exists for everyone who isn’t on Medicare. You have to either be old enough, or prove to the government that you fit their criteria for disabled before you get the reasonable price.

It’s within the governments power to lock prices. For something as medically necessary as insulin, anything less is a half measure.

they’re not talking about the CTC expiring.

no, just the bit Biden did, the thing that was cited as one of his major accomplishments.

and c’mon; Insulin is cheaper for Medicare recipients. Insulin is cheaper for the elderly. It is, in effect, the same statement. You really quibbling over wording to try and scrape together a point?

You know medicare is primarily for retirees, right?

Edit: since you only read the first sentence I quoted from CBS, here’s the second:

But as the nation struggled to emerge from the pandemic in 2021, lawmakers expanded the $2,000 credit to as much as $3,600.

and the fourth

Once it expired in 2022, the poverty rate for children soared.

https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/09/politics/inflation-reduction-act-medicare-insulin-cap/index.html

Senior citizens and other Medicare enrollees can now get a break on the cost of their insulin.

They won’t pay more than $35 a month for each insulin prescription that’s covered by their Medicare Part D plan. And they won’t be subject to a deductible for insulin.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/biden-budget-tax-child-tax-credit-ctc-eitc-who-qualifies/

The CTC isn’t a new tax credit — it’s been around since the 1990s. But as the nation struggled to emerge from the pandemic in 2021, lawmakers expanded the $2,000 credit to as much as $3,600. As part of that expansion, families received half of the CTC in monthly checks over six months, providing them with as much as $300 per child for each of those months.

That expanded tax benefit, which proved to be immensely popular with families, also helped lift millions of kids out of poverty. Once it expired in 2022, the poverty rate for children soared.

I think the Democratic Party is more to blame for running a Status Quo candidate when there’s so much dissatisfaction with the state of things. When people are angry, the guy who blows up the system is more appealing than the person trying to maintain it. You gotta actually promise to overhaul things, that’s how Obama won.

the child tax credit only lasted one year, and the cost reduction was only for the elderly

The electoral reforms would certainly help, but you risk the Trudeau effect of a candidate running on them, then getting in office and saying, “Well, it can’t be that broken if I still managed to win.”

We cut them out of the SWIFT payment system. All our economists were saying they wouldn’t last more than a few months. That was four years ago.

have you really not seen all those thinkpeices that go, “Lets dump our resources into develping AI rather than conservation and renewables, because the AI will magic up a solution for us better than anything actual researchers suggest”?

Billionaires are only free so long as they do nothing that compromises greater returns year after year. Their money is tied up in financial institutions, beholden to the demands of their fellow investors, their overall class. What you call “freedom” is just ultimate privilege. And, like any privilege, it is conditional.

Musk is the perfect example that very concept, yet you choose to dismiss it as some bizarre outlier rather than a demonstration of the rule.

I agree there are conscious people exercising power, but I’m arguing that the system they’re enmeshed within constrains the actions they’re able to make. Rather than choosing maximal extraction as a means to the goal of survivalist bunkers, they’re locked into maximal extraction. The more thoughtful may not like it, may try to break out of it, but the logic of capital will only select for someone else who has no qualms keeping the machine at full tilt.

Survival bunkers are just one way of resolving that internal contradiction; “I’m supposed to have all this power, all this agency; yet I can’t overcome the momentum of this system without jeopardizing my place at the top of it”. So they invent a goal to fit the means they’re pre-committed to. A way of rationalizing it.

The “general super-intelligent AI” investor hype is just another way of rationalizing the same contradiction. “Yes, we’re destroying the ecosystem, but it’s alright, 'cus digital God is gonna end our dependence on human labor and provide us magic solutions to all the problems before we’re completely fucked.”

when was the last time a bug hit your windsheild? we’re destroying the ecological foundation we’re living in, and we know we’re doing it, yet it still continues at pace. the sum decides what the parts do, what other conclusion can I draw?

do you actually think people are in control of this system? even the most powerful capitalist is still just exercising a privilege, to be stripped away and replaced should they ever push against the profit motive

CO2 carbon dioxide im talking about climate change not republicans, we’re all drowning

I think (though i’m not certain) it was hyperbole. Emphasizing that the median resume would look unemployable to, like, a high paying consulting firm, like the sort that does work in DC.

nearly unemployable like the rest of us

i think they meant she was just another interchangeable employee “like the rest of us” rather than that she’s particularly unemployable for whatever reason

Mon cherie, protegonist of reality, but of course

I get what you’re saying, but reducing it down to a thing we have because we need it is… overly clinical? Not particularly hopeful, anyway. Even if sexuality didn’t have the historical baggage that it does, I think things would still trend towards a community. People form a sense of shared identity over things. It’s what people do.

eyo! You just won my first downvote. Didn’t quite make a full year, sorry the vintage isn’t up to snuff

There’s all sorts of types of reproduction.

Take the reproduction of knowledge, for example. Say you have a person who never had kids, but dedicated their life’s work to something like Project Gutenberg. They’ve ensured art and writing and understanding is reproduced for generations to come. Is that pointless?