The internet has warped my mind.
Yesterday, I heard a story about a torture prison in Assad’s Syria that was using a press to do horrible things to human beings.
My mind immediately thought:
“TODAY, ON ZE HYDRAULIC PREZZ CHANNEL…”
Perfect !orphancrushing@lemmy.world.
Wasn’t there a Star Trek episode about this?
We’re the bad planet that the Federation has an existential crisis over helping.
Strange New Worlds s1e6 “Lift Us Where Suffering Cannot Reach.” Heavily adapted from Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.”
i read Catwings when I was a kid and cried at the ending
…and learned decades later she write science fiction. who is this woman.
She’s one of the treasures of English literature.
Her children’s books are as good as her science fiction themes calling out the fundamental problems we have to face as a civilization.
…she invented the “ansible”, a communication tech achieving faster than light travel, which would later be used by Orson Scott Card and other science fiction authors, mumbles away with book
I think it would be faster to list the episodes that weren’t about this
Was the city’s name Omelas?
We are all the ones who walk away from Omelas on this blessed day.
Speak for yourself!
…I haven’t read the book yet.
It’s just a short story that’s like a 10 min read
I didn’t know that! Thanks!
If it was at least it’d be good to live in it
Meanwhile our real world is still a hellscape even with the child sacrifice
Can somebody with art skills make a comic of a Make-A-Wish kid wanting to spend their wish on shooting a health insurance CEO as vengeance for bankrupting the kid’s parents for the cancer care? Maybe a panel or two of Make-A-Wish refusing and the kid saying something about how they’re gonna die soon anyway so the deterrent of penal punishment would be useless against them? Cyanide & Happiness could probably pull this off
What does it cost to do this?
Maybe it should just be a thing.
The sad thing is when you can get actual numbers on what the costs of things are to the state and federal governments to keep things the way they currently are it’s really bonkers that policy is setup the way it’s setup.
The United States spends on average about $72,500 per year per incarcerated individual, which given the number of people who are in prison due to circumstances of poverty is a lot more than it would cost to simply have the funds available to individuals to intervene before they make the choices that land them in prison. For context the median individual income in the US is $37,585
Medicaid has an median cost per enrollee of $9,108 which is about the same unsubsidized cost of private health insurance, except Medicaid has no deductible, no copays (I believe some medications do have pretty low copays but that’s all that I’ve seen during periods where we did qualify or for my special needs child who’s on a special Medicare plan for children with disabilities) and generally means you simply receive the care you need without paying a dime to the medical facility. In other words, Americans could feasibly collectively pay the government exactly what they already pay private insurance companies in premiums and receive better coverage for less cost than under the current system.
The average cost per homeless person (this is primarily a cost in extra social services to support their existence) is $35,500 per year in the US. The average annual cost of rent in US is $20,400. The US could simply pay to rent every homeless person an average apartment in the country and save $15,000/year per person in social services, and that’s before even considering more creative options such as public housing, or providing subsidies/incentives to house the housing insecure in lower cost regions of their respective states (which might well save small town America, given most small towns are consistently shrinking in population)
The unavoidable conclusion is that American politicians simply choose to burn unthinkable billions of dollars every year to perpetuate human suffering
Almost nothing relative to the us budget.
An aircraft carrier costs almost nothing compared to the US budget. That’s not a useful metric.
Less than it would cost for you to sell your body for sex? More than the cost of a single elephant? Less than 500 lbs of tulips during the crypto boom accounting for inflation.
Much less than an aircraft carrier how about that
And this wasn’t the USA government. It was a city or Make-A-Wish. (I just have the tweet to work from.)
how funny would it be if the kid was dying of a preventable disease and couldn’t afford the treatment
Don’t worry. If you live if the USA, that time is coming under Trump and RFK, Jr.
Invest in Iron Lungs. You’ll need them once the first generation of kids ain’t getting that polio vaccine.
Hilarious
Treating immune-mediated aplastic anemia involves suppression of the immune system, an effect achieved by daily medicine or, in more severe cases, a bone marrow transplant, a potential cure.[31]
🤣😂😭
Oh wow, they made a live-action version of the Witcher 4 trailer!
It took a second before it clicked. Nicely done.
That’s a wild but accurate take.
