COVID Humbug! (2022 edition)

Perhaps that’s the most succinct way to explain what’s wrong with it. :slightly_smiling_face:

When was it privatized? If it’s still in the public sector, it doesn’t make an example at all of what happens when a private sector monopoly is broken up.

Has the private sector been unduly influencing those government decisions, or not?

Yes, humans are causing species extinction, but most of them don’t wake up and say “gee I wonder which species I should extinguish today?”. They just go about doing their human stuff. For a very long time, that was fine, their impact was not so different from that of other predators, and the occasional extinction of a species due to humans showing up was perhaps unfortunate but not devastating to the biosphere in general. Now, humans are out of control. It’s the anthropocene. At this point, humans essentially are an intervention, and to stop them from being a very bad intervention, the intervention needs to be intervened with.

Corporations are also out of control. Even die-hard capitalists openly admit this now, though of course they insist it’s “not true capitalism”. Call it the corporocene if you like.

Look at RTG. What do you call a city with no metro service at all for ~2 months in 2021, not because of anything to do with covid, but simply because they couldn’t stop the goddamn trains from falling off the tracks? Why, a G7 capital, of course! :roll:

The second example was about the general idea of P3’s in public transit, not specifically RTG (which was not set up by the city iiuc, though it was certainly enabled by it.) Another city in Ontario decided to outsource its public transit to Uber a few years ago. Since you agreed with the first example (the state forcing the individual to engage in commerce with Big Tech in order to access a public service), I suppose you’re facing two red buttons now. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

I could have given many other examples: long term care homes in North America (Revera etc.), custom HR software by IBM in Canada and Australia, the “prison-industrial complex”… the list really does go on and on. There are many issues involved, but one consistent factor is the profit motive.

If Phoenix (see IBM) isn’t a good enough argument that the “efficiency” line is horseshit, what is? How far into the same “bottomless honeypot” do P3’s need to reach before they deserve to get yanked out, whether or not their arms falls off in the process (so to speak)?

It looks like we’re back to the flat tax argument, then, or something close to it. Been there, done that, and apparently no-one’s mind changed in the slightest.

Kang & Kodos would be proud! :rainbow:

That’s usually a key element of any electoral reform proposal in those jurisdictions that don’t already have it.

:rofl: