Hakeem doesn't say stuff like this and that's why he needs to go.

Hakeem will describe vague notions of problems to be fixed with ultimate solutions that end up being "give health insurers more money".

Abdul is proposing the policy, medicare for all, and saying "but call it whatever you want". Hakeem will identify a problem, but ultimately will push dogshit policies that aren't popular.

That's part of why he's so much better.

It's amazing to have the base screaming for taxes with leadership acting like that new revenue would somehow be bad.

Hopefully this ratfuckery kills Newsom's presidential run. He's so transparently corrupt.

I can't believe William shatner outlived him.

You also forgot about the private interests in building the rail. We can't have the government doing this, that's insane. Instead we need to find a way to funnel money to Union Pacific so they park their 2 mile long cargo trains for 3 hours blocking all amtrak trains. Then they can keep collecting maintenance fees which they pocket for decades until a train derails, at which point they begrudgingly replace some of the rotting lumber that's been there for 200 years.

That's the true american capitalist way. Anything else is just too expensive.

I'd feel more strongly at protecting national brands if they didn't outsource and import 99% of the car. The only national brand that primarily manufactures everything in the us is Tesla, and it's ran by an anti-union nazi.

So communism was bad because western billionaires couldn’t profit from it.

Yup. When you dig into the history of Cuba, Iran, basically all of central and South America, what you ultimately find is "This nation decided it wanted to be communist, but that hurt the bottom lines of banana, sugar, and oil companies, so the US waged unrelenting covert and overt wars against these nations".

The reason everyone was focused on this primary is because AES flies in the face of decades of democrat strategies.

The democrat consultants would all say that "In a purple state like Michigan, you should run the most conservative democrat possible. Otherwise, you'll lose. Moderates win states which constantly flip from democrat to republican".

AES is michigan voters rejecting that notion and running someone that is to the left of a lot of democrats currently in office. That's them ignoring what the establishment want. It's even more significant because he was outspent 9:1 (10:1? 12:1? That's a fuzzy number, but by a lot).

The general will prove whether or not this was a good strategy (I think it is). And if it is successful, it upsets the narrative of a LOT of pundits. It shouldn't be possible (according to them) for Abdul to wins.

This is why this is generally seen as a very important election.

I'm a similar age and can certainly relate.

Most of what I was told about communism was from people that didn't know what communism or socialism was. All the bad parts were basically what's wrong with any authoritarian government. "In soviet russia, you could be arrested for speaking out against the party! Isn't that awful!" That sort of a thing.

Once I realized that communism, socialism, and authoritarianism were all very different things and that many nations have varying degrees of each, it was game over. Someone being a communist or socialist just didn't mean anything to me. Especially since most of the time what they are actually advocating for is simply improving public infrastructure in ways that it used to work before Reagan and Clinton got in office and destroyed our public institutions.

Yeah, if you are looking for waste, fraud, and abuse it's this right here. It's endemic in all things health related. Very few individual patients are wasting social welfare money, instead it's almost entirely the providers who are milking the government.

Yet for some reason (hmmm) basically all the laws to "stop fraud" focus around the patients and not the providers. May have something to do with the fact that senators like Rick Scott being one of the biggest medicare fraudsters in the US.

Waste in government happens when private businesses get involved. There's very little real waste (beyond, ironically, laws which create waste to try and stop waste or means test recipients).

Healthcare should be nationalized. We'd save huge amounts of money by eliminating all these private company hucksters stealing public funds.

For a daycare, it's because setting up a new one is expensive and risky. You need property, insurance, and licensing. You need employees you've vetted and trained. It takes months to do all this and during these months you aren't making any income.

Nursing homes are even worse because they have a lot of legal requirements (that should exist!) which raises the barrier even further.

It's hard to get the loans needed for these new businesses if you aren't already wealthy.

The people that are wealthy enough to do this are instead investing in PE firms which buy up daycares and run them into the ground for profit. You are looking at "I could invest here for 10 or 20% return and I don't have to do any of the management work" or "I can invest here for 3 to 5% return and it's a full time job running the place".

Mind you, once these places are established, a LOT of the owners just do "market rates" for everything because, of course, they are quite greedy and the returns doesn't really improve when you treat your employees well.

Yeah, the most blatant example of this is national debates. On the topic of healthcare I've not seen a national debate that hasn't framed universal healthcare "questions" as some sort of extremely expensive unaffordable luxury that will make jesus cry because it's communist.

IE "Mister Sanders, you support universal healthcare which our analysts say will cost 1 trillion dollars and will cause insurance companies to go bankrupt costing thousands of jobs. How will you solve these problems?" (not exact, but pretty close).

There's a tendency for people with autism to have fixate on aspects of education. It can also be hard for them to learn things that aren't interesting to them.

This creates a problem for the education system that instead wants uniform education. It's also just a problem in general as a lot of classes build on one another.

I had someone (well, multiple really) people in my EE classes who could do insane things in terms of physical build outs, but really struggled on pretty simple concepts that weren't interesting to them.