🎓 Dr. Freemo 🇳🇱 @freemo@social.cleverlibre.org

Me as a motivational speaker.

#funny #humour #humor #joke #jokes #meme @funny

@thor Well there is two sides to my opinion.. There is the more "objective" (I will have biases like anyone else) side, which is due to my Data Science work int he health care industry.. So i have a decent sense of the failures across most of europe and why the system is trash (as is the US system of course but in different ways)... then there are my personal experiences which mostly turned out to be completely in line with what the data already told me.

The specific issues i could elucidate vary from country to country as you suggest too. Some are relatively worse than others. This tends to create a local bias where if your in a country that is relatively better than your neighbor you think you have it great and never really see the problems, they are just the norm and something that seems universal.

So one point: "and there is no questions asked about whether you're covered"

This is true in america too if we are talking about emergency services. If you go to an ER they are requried to treat you and they can not deny you treatment if you arent covered.

As for being treated by doctors, it isnt much different than in europe in the sense that if you arent covered a regular GP (general doctor) will refuse to see you if you refuse to pay. So yes much like in america you do absolutely need to be covered. It is certainly cheaper in europe though and that is one way europe has addressed a problem that america has, the pricing is better, but that comes with other costs.

The flip side of that is that the quality of care in most of europe, as well as some data privacy issues are in the trasher.

To give you an idea of my situation, I was living in the ntherlands which has one of the shortest wait times of any european country, yet their wait time is still astronomical compared to the USA. I had a spinal herniation (my disc was leaking into my spine and pressing on teh cord causing imobility and extreme pain)... There was a simple treatment that involved getting a needle in my back, took about 5 minutes to do. Problem is you couldnt schedule it ahead of time since they dont know when a needle will wear off, can be a month, can be 6, so once it starts wearing off you have to maket he appointment. since appointments were always multiple months into the future that basically meant that even though I had access to effectively a non-surgical cure it mean going 1 - 2 months in extreme torturous agony and being bed ridden every few months, all because the system was so overloaded they couldn't find the time to do a 5 minute pin prick.

Statistically speaking this is a huge problem across almost all universal and socialized healthcare countries, the wait times are enourmous and as a result cause a great deal of death and suffering that otherwise could be avoided.

The privacy issue is another, because of the nature of universal healthcare it tends to mean one of two things 1) you can not pay purely in cash and choose not to have insurance, which means you cant be anonymous your health data will be tracked and you have no control over that 2) if you are on controlled substances there is no way to avoid winding up in a database for that which may be used against you at some point in the future.

@tombies@social.tchncs.de

@blinkwarp Technically linux is capitalism as it is opt-in and voluntary if you want to share and contribute to it. In order to be socialism you'd have to be forced by law to use linux.

@thor I agree our system is bad, and sadly Obama care made it far worse (my isnurance went up 4x in cost after Obamacare and my quality of care went down)...

That said I also live in europe and have european healthcare.. Sadly my expiernces in europe is that the healthcare is also horrific, just as bad as america, just in very different ways. I have yet to see a country with sane healthcare.

I've been treated and ultimately had surgery in europe and I can say I wouldnt wish the european of healthcare on my worst enemy, its broken, fix it! But I also wouldnt recommend the USA approach. Your screwed no matter where you are and **no one** seems too concerned with fixing their own systems.

@mur2501

Then that would prove my point even more, supply and demand suggests that as long as you arent producing more rice than what is needed then it wont go to waste, you will get a price that covers your cost or more, at least on the aggregate.

The real issue with farmers complaining is that they used to be able to export rice to america (which caused a lot of pollution and ultimately wasnt the best deal for the USA)... and now monsanto enabled american farmers to produce more and therefore need less from india. So india exports less and farmers make less.. Sucks for india, but its great for america. I wouldnt say in and of itself that is a bad thing though, india was just producing more rice than it needed to, markets shift, its not a bad thing.

@dankmaximus @trinsec

@mur2501

people still need to buy rice, why would they buy rice imported from the USA and not local rice? Both would presumably sell at the same price regardless of monsanto's existence.

@dankmaximus @trinsec

@kura LOL at the sun taking pictures!

@mur2501

Monsanto was certainly after making money, and that in and of itself isnt always a bad thing.. and yea it meant american farms could afford the seed stock and outperform other foreign food sources. but that also means we are shipping less food over seas (therefore much less pollution) and while farmers might make less money it also means food is cheaper and stays local. so one could argue it also had a positive effect on the community even if it was worse for the local farmers.

My point is not to defend monsanto though, it is merely to point out its a very nuanced thing to evaluate.

@dankmaximus @trinsec

@zpartacoos

Ya know, I want to start off by saying I dont view myself as smart, I accept it only because everyone states it as so, but as a person society has labeled "smart" I can say that to me it doesnt appear i have too many special skills or do anything different than anyone else other than to simply try and not give up when i fail, and to keep trying till i either get to a solution or I understand why a solution cant be achieved. I have come to beleive being "smart" is more about persistence than it is about any natural abilities (though not being discouraged too easily might be a natural ability).

the other thing is making sure ideas stick, thats a big part of it. For that I suppose I do make some calculated decisions. For that side of things I find its all about application, learn a concept but not just for the sake of learning, think about fun creative ways to apply the knowledge and do it before moving on to the next idea (even if its just on paper to prove it out), if youc ant go so far as applying the idea try to add your own twist or modifications to it and discuss it with those who undertand the idea (IRC is great for that for educated subjects. People will probably give you a lot of resistance for doing this as it comes off as quackery (trying to improve or modify classical theories when you yourself barely understand them)... but it isnt about your ideas being true, even finding out why your modifications would fail to bring an improvement is something you learned and is of value.

In the endit always comes back to one thing to me though... failure is as valuable if not more so than success, as you learned something you thought to be true was not, so you learned something new and important.

@dankmaximus

Most people seem to view them as rather evil.. I dont think the view is entirely deserved, or rather it is exaggerated a lot, but I wouldn't go so far as to say they are the good guys either, even if their products have done a lot of good for the world (like vitamin enriches rice that has saved many).

@mur2501 @trinsec

@nanko

It really is

@Science

@trinsec Really? There is a whole computer in the picture just for size comparison!

@mur2501 A corperation that sells genetically modified plant seeds. they are huge and a large portion of the worlds food comes from their seed stock. @trinsec

@mur2501

monsanto, turning rice into dildos for 10 years now :)

@trinsec

@hector yea its more accurate to say encoding.. and while I agree it hasn't been thoroughly tested im not sure that is a requirement for the definition. Even a dangerous and failed vaccine is still a vaccine.

To me it isnt a redefinition of vaccine at all, it satisfies both existing definitions.. it is a subcomponent vaccine (has a component of the virus, specifically the mrna from it), and it is designed to trigger an immune response. so it satisfies both definitions.

Its dangerous, we shouldnt let it out to the public without testing, I share all of your concerns. Just saying, despite not liking it, it is a vaccine.

I think what your arguing is that the term is so general (and not descriptive of the fact that it is an entierly new approach) that the term vaccine is not useful, or good for us to use... in that sense I somewhat agree, the term vaccine is vague to the point of not being terribly descriptive, which is concerning as it masks a lot of the concern. On that we agree.

In a way I think your just arguing something different than what your saying.. you aren't really arguing "This doesn't fall under the definition of a vaccine so we shouldn't call it that"... you are really arguing "The term vaccine is far too vague to be useful so we shouldn't call it or anything a vaccine, we need new more descriptive words".. If i am correct then I'd be more likely to agree with the latter than the former.

@Jdogg247 Except they would be on their 127th season in 2 years and everyone had stopped watching by now :)

@trinsec Yes its life sized, thats monsanto rice, one grain can feed a family of 4!

@hector So to answer your question much of the technology around various types of vaccines we are dealing with here are, in fact, new, this is true. While that should concern anyone deciding to take it lets not let our bias against it cloud the question at hand, which is should they call it a vaccine.

So on the one hand I kinda get your concern, its such a new tech that it can create a false sense of security to just call it a vaccine as people may assume its just as reliable and tested as a technology as other vaccines on the market.

With that said the issue to me isnt so much that the tech is new, yea that compounds safety concerns, but really its not that at all. Its that even classical vaccines require about 5 years of clinical testing to establish their safety, any less than that even for very serious illnesses has never been ok in recent history... Here we have a vaccine rushed through in 1/5th the time AND doesnt resemble traditional vaccines, thats a dangerous combo IMO.

With all that said is it a vaccine though? I'd say as much as I'd love to argue it isnt in truth it is.

The definition of a vaccine has always been something like the following "Vaccine: A product that stimulates a person's immune system to produce immunity to a specific disease, protecting the person from that disease." so anything that gets your immune system to recognize a disease and be able to defend against it is a vaccine.

Furthermore while the specific tech is a bit new and the pfizer vaccine is unique in that it intentionally is designed to promote replication, it would still fall rather neatly under one of the 4 major types of vaccine: 1) live virus vaccines (attenuated) 2) inactivated vaccines (dead) 3) Subunit vaccines, 4) toxoid vaccines.

The pfizer mRNA based vaccine would fall clearly under #3. Though this may be the first subunit vaccine that is also a live vaccine of a sort as it can still replicate (though only part of the virus replicates and cant replicate a second generation. So I'd say its pretty well within the realm of the word vaccine.