I had communist leaning political sentiment in my youth, and traveled to Cuba in my early 20's.
You could tell the country (and Havana in particular) had once been stunning. I was horrified by what I saw; just how broken the infrastructure was, how poor and destitute the people were. The quality of food was poor, the country dirty, access to basic energy needs unmet. The cost of basic services high (i.e. $100 USD cab ride from airport to Havana).
I spent a lot of time getting to know locals and understanding what life looked like. Ration books for food, suppression of speech and behavior/associations. At the time, I was a mad keen surfer and met a few locals who showed me their hand-made boards, sourced from scrap and supplies stolen from their jobs. The state at the time viewed it as a non-sanctioned activity, and so no resources were approved for it.
That experience for me was certainly the straw that broke the camels back in terms of sympathy for communist-leaning ideologies. I hope the Cuban people break free of state tyranny.
The U.S. leads in advanced diagnostics (MRI, CT scans), surgical techniques, pharmaceuticals, and access to the latest therapies. (Cuban hospitals often lack basic supplies, equipment, and medications.)
Care?
Patients in Cuba often face rationing and shortages of drugs, even common antibiotics or painkillers. The U.S. has issues with affordability but generally ensures availability once in the system.
Doctors?
Cuba trains many doctors, but the government sends them abroad for revenue, leaving gaps in domestic care.
Advanced treatments?
The U.S. is the global leader in pharmaceutical development, medical devices, and innovation.
“better” might imply higher quality of care and outcomes for complex conditions, where the U.S. clearly outperforms.
Compared to the US. While not uncontested (they are accused of falsifying data), cuba posts better infant mortality rates.
A lot of the medical issues in Cuba aren't related to the healthcare system but rather to trade embargos. It's a small miracle they do as well as they do given the constraints of being an island nation.
The reason for their success on a shoestring budget is administrative competence. They have a large number of clinics (rather than big hospital complexes) and education in medicine starts at those clinics. Future doctors work and are educated in medicine moving up into specialties. It's a little like making everyone that wants to practice medicine start as a orderly in a family medicine clinic.
IMO, this is superior to the US system of requiring several years of schooling before ever interacting with patients. And if you know an old nurse, you'll know they often do know a lot more than new doctors.
I don't think you understand what an embargo is. The USA isn't blockading Cuba; they're free to trade with other countries like Venezuela or whatever. International trade requires the consent of both parties, and there's no moral or legal obligation to trade with a hostile foreign power (or allow our financial systems to be used to facilitate such trade).
The embargo would likely end soon if the Cuban government takes basic, simple steps like introducing open multiparty democracy, free market capitalism, and freedom for political prisoners. These steps would obviously benefit all Cubans so there's no possible reason to delay making those changes regardless of their impact on international trade.
The US enforces the embargo by cutting trade with any country doing trade with Cuba. It's not just a simple embargo between the US and Cuba, it's one that forces a country/company to make the decision "trade with Cuba or trade with the US".
That's what you said, but it is a just a coy semantic game by any real interpretation. The US took extra measures and went out of there way to strong arm any potential trade partners.
No sane or responsible nation would give up trade with the US and major parts of it's hemisphere of influence (Europe, Japan, Korea, etc) to access an island with nothing to offer in an inconvenient place.
The US, out of spite, demolished the Cuban economy and then spent decades beating the corpse for good measure long after the fight was over or justified.
Last I checked, they basically only got access to meaningful trade from Venezuela and China for a few decades, right?
The Cubans demolished their own economy. That's what Communists always do. Their problems are 100% self inflicted. They could end the embargo tomorrow if they take the necessary measures.
And the US just used their spies to assist in the overthrow of a few dozen (often democratic) countries in the 20th century because it was funny.
We would never use our economic or military might to sabotage competing nations or ideologies and any suffering in the world that looks like a direct result of those policies is simply the result of communism. It was totally a fair playing field.
Operation Cyclone wasn't real. The mujahideen aren't real. Don't look at the CIA behind the curtain.
While we're at it, do you want to really go all in and explain to me how McCarthyism also wasn't real? All those people just believed in an ideology that naturally results in their imprisonment, the US government would never silence anyone for their beliefs or anything.
This is actually nonsense, and it's silly that so many people repeat it as a justification of the corrupt, repressive Cuban regime when it's so easy to refute. The U.S. sanctions apply mainly to US companies and entities, and while they can sometimes be applied to companies in other countries, it's rare, and even more so for other countries as a whole. I know for a fact that many major countries regularly trade with Cuba. Are you going to now say that Canada has been cut off from U.S. trade because it also trades with Cuba? That's news to me. (Trump's idiotic tariff war notwithstanding since it's from a separate cause)
The state of the embargo has changed with the administrations.
Clinton relaxed it in 2000. Bush did nothing with it, Obama further relaxed it in 2014 and 2015, Trump reversed some of those relaxations in 2017, in 2021 Biden restored the state designation as a terrorist state.
During the height of the embargo, it absolutely was the case that the US applied maximum pressure and soft power in keeping countries from trading with Cuba. That was even part of the point of USAID "do what we tell you, or we'll stop these aid shipments" (not specifically for Cuba, but more broadly).
You know of companies personally trading there because the nature of the embargo has changed over the last 25 years. I'm old enough that I remember the pre 2000 relationship with Cuba. Admittedly, that probably makes me think the state is more harsh than it currently is. Old age does weird things to how you perceive things.
Written by someone who apparently doesn't know a thing about Latin American healthcare and has no experience of it. As someone who lives in a major Latin American country and has for many years, and has spent time in several others, I can tell you that both the public and private healthcare standards are very good for the most part, and standards are a lot higher than whatever caricature idea of some banana republic jungle hospital you seem to have. Mexico and Brazil in particular have hospitals that are at least as good as most American counterparts would be.
That's a horrific price to pay for the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff.
Personally I look to Scandinavia for the ideal model. High economic freedom & mobile capital, excellent healthcare & public services, high degree of social rights & liberties.
The Scandinavian economic model has certain positives but it's hardly ideal. Collapsing population demographics, high immigration rates, and the need to increase military spending are creating a lot of pressure. But more importantly there is a severe lack of economic dynamism: in terms of major technology companies they basically have Spotify, Ericsson, and that's it. So long term they risk being left behind by the world economy, and reduced to the status of vassal states.
>Yet they manage to have better healthcare overall.
Really? You've got the numbers and overall view to know this, as opposed to simply the stats from a famously mendacious, repressive one-party regime that has been repressing all kinds of access to information against even its own people for decades?
This is your response? That the U.S healthcare system is full of problems no doubt, but you think referencing a Michael Moore documentary is a case of using good data? Hilarious.
China needs sugar and is allowed to trade with Cuba. They import about $3B of sugar every year, mostly from Brazil. Most likely Cuba just isn't cost competitive: Communists have never managed to get the basics of agriculture right.
yes sure but that's off topic. The parent wasn't talking about that, they were talking about the quality of the food being poor, electricity infrastructure bad etc. That stuff is impacted by being severely restricted from trade.
So much of this is phrased as “communism bad” and sure, it has been. But this lesson could equally be phrased as “electing personality cult strongman and gutting the mechanisms that prevented personal rule and dominance of the economy are bad.” Just as food for thought.
> This is not an ask from or concern of the general population.
It isn’t, but when asked in a “Do you support saving children?” way a lot of people do support it. You might say that’s idiotic, and you’re right, but any campaign to reverse this stuff has to reckon with it.
Anyone who asks that is arguing in bad faith and using children as political weapons to achieve their ends. It's gotten to the point I outright dismiss anything the politicians say the second I hear the words "children" and "terrorists".
This is what I mean when I say it has to be reckoned with. You can outright dismiss it yourself but it doesn’t make it go away when a sizeable number of voters do not dismiss it.
Worse, Governments seem to have gotten the idea that it's their place to tell the population what to do and want when it should be the other way around.
It is more a long the lines that large document leaks have allowed people to see how NGOs have become vehicles for State Intelligence and corporate/political power.
Can you point me to some leaks you are referring to? Honestly curious. I have no doubt that there are some bad actors in this space, but Non Governmental Organizations is such a wide category I find it strange that that acronym keeps popping up like some evil entity rather than calling out the individual orgs.
I don't have time/will to find more consolidating information but some EU-Elites regularly use NGOs to support their own policy goals, against member states governments and their populations. They always excuse themselves by saying they fund everyone... but one side of the issue usually gets more funds than the other.
If I recall correctly in one "EU wants to monitor the internet" regulations, EU directly funded targeted AD campaigns to convinced some Member state populations to support it so the government would change its intended vote. They were caught and backed off. Then they funded some NGO to do it :D
I don't see where disinformation or Russians come in. It is well documented that some NGOs are pushing changes in internet legislation to benefit themselves and their donors financially.
>And the parents that are worried about their children getting fucked up by hardcore porn and social media.
Rarely brought up during the OSA debate, but I think we all know every UK ISP has "Safety Shield" on to block access to adult entertainment - by default. When purchasing the service you're asked if you want it disabled.
If parents are disabling it, they can't be that worried.
I know plenty of lifelong smokers who lack cancer, so it’s fine then?
In any case, if we’re to share anecdotes, I don’t have a single man I know that has said “wow, pornography has enriched my childhood / adult life.” I know plenty that have had trouble in their relationships, however.
1. "Parents of children", unfortunately, have little political clout (also when including their votes).
2. Children are not "fucked up" by seeing people having sex. I mean, ok, parents can be worried about them being "fucked up", but this is to a great extent the same engineering-of-consciousness that the TF article is discussing, and which the UK government wishes to affect.
It depends what you consider a “serious NGO,” but the NSPCC, the Molly Rose Foundation, the Breck Foundation, the End Violence Against Women Coalition, and other NGOs actively campaigned for and supported it.
This is either a tautology or meaningless, depending on semantics.
Q: Are there today, or have there ever been in history, any non-corrupt governments (that by your implication are invulnerable to lobbying)?
I’m pretty sure lobbying is a thing everywhere, regardless of corruption. People want the government to do stuff and will try to make it happen, from autocracies to direct democracies and everything in between.
Of course. Writing to your representative is you wanting the government to do something. There's nothing wrong with that. It's only when government is corrupt that it's a problem.
So you’re saying “lobbying can do something, even when the government is not corrupt”?
If so, then yes, that’s the point I was making, which refutes the statement that lobbying only does something if the government is corrupt. If not, then I’m confused, please help me understand what I’m missing.
I took a modern european history paper in college, and the biggest thing I took away was the catholic church's initial opposition to anything that changes in the social sphere. Within a fear years it always adapts it into its power structure and life continues.
Ygg doesn't operate strictly as a shortest path protocol. It prefers lowest latency links already and they're roadmapped to handle link cost / dynamic weighting / link congestion. They're targeting a blended weighted metric overlay which would certainly prefer the chain of quick/fat links.
I ask as someone hyped about decentralized protocol but only following ygg from a distance -- who are they building it for, is there a use case or commercial customer that wants this, or is it more of an idealistic/political endeavor ? I guess I'm wondering how mature the org behind it is, if they're setup for the long haul or taking steps forward when they can, on a hobbyist basis.
I just installed it and it gave me a routable ipv6 address on my shitty little VPS that didn't have one. I'm guessing that if I put this on my laptop then that too will have an ipv6 address and I can communicate from my laptop to the server via ipv6, like tailscale; and vice versa I guess. Playing with it now. Basically link all of your devices to the network and it gets an IPv6; but ...the IP changes every time its run based on getting new keys. So, rolling keys by default? Haven't tested. But I guess if I keep the same key, the IPv6 that's assigned to it remains the same?
Will update later, because the yggdrasil website leaves me more confused than answering anything.
I've seen it posted and cheered about over socials (lemmy, hnews, reddit); might be cool to test.
From the docs:
> However, autoconfigure mode allows you to quickly start Yggdrasil using sane-ish default settings, with yggdrasil -autoconf. In this mode, Yggdrasil will automatically attempt to peer with other nodes on the same subnet but will not attempt to connect to public peers by default. It also generates a random set of keys each time it is started, and therefore a random IP address each time.
> I started using yggdrasil yesterday. The ability to get a static IPv6 address on a meshnet, with encrypted traffic by default, and the option to only accept inbound connections from public keys I trust is incredibly cool. Just like that I can access any of my devices that run ygg from anywhere using standard tools like git or ssh (or git-annex). It makes it really easy to network my devices together without having to screw around with split tunneling a wireguard server and create a DIY set of services to, for example, remotely manage my devices or sync things from one to the other, and that's just for starters. Feels like the Unix philosophy actually being useful for once
I've worked with plenty of talented engineers who behave like this. It takes a certain psychology to achieve incredible technical feats, however they often come at the cost of personality issues in playing with others.
You add these personalities together, where everybody believes they are right an everybody else is wrong then it's a recipe for disaster.
People have to learn to adapt to change, or they get burnt out continually hitting the brick wall.
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