this post was submitted on 08 Feb 2025

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Badminton (slrpnk.net)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

Two wrongs don't make a right

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 months ago (3 children)

Yeah CEO’s and shareholders are driving it to the extreme, but in the end everybody wants their interest on savings/investments, their yearly wage increases etc. The whole economic system is at fault and America is driving it to the extreme.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

The whole economic system is at fault and America is driving it to the extreme.

No, americans are just speed-running it.

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[–] [email protected] 77 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Fake. CEO’s aight choosing shit. They’re going to Paris and Barcelona

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[–] [email protected] 54 points 2 months ago (7 children)

Holy shit, insulin is ~$98 on average over there!?
That is literally the most expensive place to buy insulin on this planet.
Most countries have insulin available for ~1/5th that price or less, with many selling it for less than 1/10th of the US price.

I knew it was bad over there but that’s fucking atrocious.
At least you’re more free over there than anywhere else though, right?
Right?

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[+] [email protected] -41 points 2 months ago (6 children)

You’re only deciding between insulin and groceries because the government maintains some company’s monopoly on manufacturing insulin.

In an actually free market, the instructions would be open source and the only question would be whether to synthesize it at home or pay someone else to synthesize it for you.

My guess is it would cost about as much as chocolate does per unit mass.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Hard lol at the thought of synthesizing insulin at home. Look a bit into the practical aspects of medicine manufacturing and the quality assurances required to avoid killing the patients.

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 2 months ago (1 children)

The free market naturally generates monopolies, only government intervention can maintain an artificially competitive market in the long term.

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[–] [email protected] 46 points 2 months ago

No free market on insulin here in Finland.

Insulin is free.

Capitalism created American price gouging. You have people dying over something that's completely treatable.

If the "resources were allocated" correctly, then it's not efficient in any way for an economy to have people dying over something as cheap and easy to treat just because someone can blackmail people to pay more.

My unemployed friend who is a single mother with type 1 diabetes and who has two kids with type one diabetes would be in real fucking life danger in the US. As it stands, she doesn't need to worry about that. All because we haven't (yet) allowed capitalism to (completely) rape our healthcare system.

[–] [email protected] 50 points 2 months ago (2 children)

In a "true free market" the instructions would be hoarded by the company that came up with them and the insulin would be sold for as much as humanly possible. The only countries that don't suffer from this issue are the ones where the government is handling Healthcare and dictates what it's willing to pay for medicine.

You anti government regulation types sure as fuck don't seem to understand how we got to having all these regulations. Hint it was companies abusing their customers and employees to the point where tens of thousands of people were dying, for each regulation.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago

Yes, people confuse "free" (unregulated) with "competetive market" all the time.

If "free" means "no barriers to market entry or exit and even distribution of market power" then they're similar.

But if free means "no regulation" then it'll just be a race to accumulate the most market power (and political and military force) and use that to suppress competition. Features like slavey and indentured debtors has commonly occurred in 'free' (unregulated) markets, but it is just about the complete opposite of 'no barriers and even market power'.

'Free' is a not a great word in this context.

[+] [email protected] -13 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Is how to manufacture insulin a trade secret? Is that why there’s no black market for it?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago

Insulin is a bad example because its manufacturing methods are relatively old, but the entire point of patents is to avoid trade secrets. The idea is that inventors share how they do something exactly, and their invention gets legally protected for a certain amount of time before it becomes available for everyone. The problem is capitalism is capitalism, and so it incentivizes abuse, so corporations will flood the system with patents that have as little detail as legally allowed and try to apply them in the broadest way possible. The pharmaceutical industry in particular also seems to have a problem with companies patenting minor tweaks on their products when the previous patent is about to expire to keep a monopoly, and then dialing up the propaganda against their previous product up to 11.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 2 months ago

There literally is a black market for it. My city, Las Vegas is littered with handmade signs and flyers of saying they buy and sell insulin and diabetic supplies.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Those are two nonequivalent industries with wildly different variables of influence. Did AI write this?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago

No, the one who wrote that is intensely human, trust them.

[+] [email protected] -10 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Yeah I know. One of the big differences between prescription drugs and food, in terms of the industries, is that anyone can bake bread and therefore the only reason to buy it at the store is if the loaf at the store costs less time and energy than making it oneself.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago (1 children)

A better equivalency would be the insulin industry and a Diamond industry unrestricted by region.

[–] [email protected] -5 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Not really because people can die without food, and also without insulin. Nobody is choosing between diamonds and insulin.

Insulin is expensive because of a government-enforced monopoly. It’s a simple fact, no matter how motivated one is to ignore it.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago

Insulin, like most meds in the US, is expensive because of the free market.

If you have a free market on life-saving medicine, guess what, people will pay however much they can afford and then some - because people are keen to survive.

In most (all?) European countries medicines are regulated. Some medicines have many manufacturers, some have a "government-enforced" monopoly but without free market, and the result is that no matter the country, insulin is free or almost free. The reason is that when you regulate this, and the only possible buyer for a whole country is "the government", the seller is forced to negotiate with the whole government to be able to sell to X million people. And the government is not in a life or death situation, so it's less vulnerable to price gouging.

If the governments can negotiate a low enough price, then they can subsidise the last bit via taxes and people get free life-saving drugs. Yet big-pharma still gets profits at these lower prices, as evidenced by the number of pharma companies there are in Europe (including non-eu countries that work similarly in terms of healthcare such as UK, Switzerland).

Free market works, until the seller has a life-threatening reason why the buyer will be forced to pay whatever the price is. The drug situation in the US is not free market, it's free blackmail.

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[–] [email protected] 46 points 2 months ago (4 children)

Badminton is criminally underrated

[–] [email protected] 26 points 2 months ago (3 children)

It might have better PR if they renamed it to "Goodminton."

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago (2 children)

I prefer squash.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 months ago (3 children)

pfft, squash has nothing on pumpkin

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago

Only at the end of October.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Squash is good too. I actually played quite a bit when I was young. But imo nothing compares to the feeling of defending smash successfully esp. multiple times in a row.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago (3 children)

It might have something to do with me sucking at badminton, but squash seems easier to hit the thing. Even if it’s a little more intensive cardio wise.

I can’t not shill my favourite sport though now. Rock climbing. Mostly indoor sport or bouldering, but i climbed my first outdoor boulder last week and I’m hooked. Just got a torn tendon so can’t really do anything right now.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I literally just had my first indoor bouldering session yesterday and loved it

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

That’s awesome. Do you think you would keep doing it?

What did you love about it the most? For me it’s kinda meditative. I’m quite neurotic and I find it hard to shut off my mind but the mix of physical and problem solving involved in climbing has me captivated and in the moment.

Don’t do what I did and push to hard and listen to your body. Really focus on climbing with your legs and not pulling with your arms as you’ll be able to go longer. You can practice keeping arms straight and relying on your legs to push up and thus your arm will bend without using the bicep. Then you can reach for the next one.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (4 children)

Yeah, I think so! There's a trans indoor climbing group in my city that meets once a month, and it's really comfy being around other queer folks while doing it. I really enjoyed the camaraderie that entailed, building each other up and looking out for one another.

I definitely felt what you're talking about, quieting my mind and focusing on the problem at hand.

Funnily enough, I probably will have to focus more on using my arms than my legs. I have a physical disability and my knees are a major pain point. I use a power chair a lot of the time outside the house. I actually loved that nobody made me feel infantilised even though I rocked up in it.

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[–] [email protected] 119 points 2 months ago (1 children)

You might not have to pay $.02 in taxes every year to accommodate transgender prisoners, but at least egg prices are down...right?

...right?

[–] [email protected] 51 points 2 months ago (2 children)

[–] [email protected] 44 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Oh my God. Eggs are expensive because people aren't buying them!

[–] [email protected] 31 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Ye olde inverted supply and demand, just like my econ professor taught me

[–] [email protected] 17 points 2 months ago

Idk what could possibly be causing a supply problem, all the chickens in the country are as healthy as can be.

The DOGE said so.

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