"The campaigns with the biggest apparent international reach were under the name of an organisation called Chance Letikva (Chance for Hope, in English) - registered in Israel and the US."
Chance Letikva is registered with the US IRS as a charity. They've filed a Form 990. Location is Brooklyn, NY. [1] Address is listed. It's a small house. It's also incorporated as CHANCE LETIKVA, INC. in New York State. Address matches. Names of officers not given. There's one name in the IRS filing, listed as the president.
Web site "https://chanceletikva.org" has been "suspended". Domain is still registered, via Namecheap.
Some on the ground digging and subpoenas should reveal who's behind this.
The article says they visited both the US and Israel registration addresses and didn't find the organisation's offices. I was impressed by the amount of "on the ground digging" by the journalists here!
It's really not that hard to find someone to go to check a address, redditors do this all the time. It should be expected as basic journalism, especially with high claims.
Check an address and interview anyone resident there in a way that gets useful answers to the questions at hand.
In this instance it was a bust because no one useful was there. But if the mastermind behind the whole operation was there you’d want a professional to ask them questions. Because once they know they’ve been rumbled they’re probably going to disappear.
Why does every discussion have to wind up with a digression thread about how "real" or, even worse, "basic" journalism is something from a sepia-tinged golden age of muckrakers getting blitzed with Dorothy Parker? People are trying. There's lots of shıt masquerading as journalism, but this ain't it.
Pretty impressive work. I always wondered what all those correspondents do that news organisations employ all over the world. I guess that's one of those things.
I’m… not sure what’s there to wonder, really. They do the exact same thing as reporters back home: journalism. Meaning write articles and do investigative work required for writing articles, whether going to press conferences, finding people to interview, or something like this, called investigative journalism.
A news piece in a foreign affairs section is likely to have been written by a correspondent because that’s what their job and specialty is. If it’s an op-ed or a commentary or analysis piece, even more so. It’s not like you can do good journalism without boots on the ground, no matter how connected the world is these days.
I agree - I noticed this as well. Also feels like it such an upsetting story that someone was motivated to really to the bottom of it. They also probably knew that if the story got traction people would be running down there own checks.
I mean it does feel like that should be standard operation for journalism on bigger stories but I think our expectations from journalists have really fallen over the last 5 years with all the slop coming in.
The behavior that this article outlines is outrageous. But it makes me uncomfortable for this to be the kind of place where anonymous strangers self-investigate lurid allegations against random accused, no matter how disturbing the allegations.
Most of us don’t have the tools or the time to do it properly, at least on here; and that can end badly [0]. It rarely achieves a thoughtful considered outcome, and there are other places to do that kind of thing if you want to—some of those communities, like Bellingcat, seem pretty well-practiced in their methodologies, and their findings seem to have accordingly high impact.
is it normal for these places to have 0 liabilities? That alone seems like it ought to raise a flag - if you're not spending the money...
Edit: Clicked through some of the other entries in there and yeah, usually liabilities are relatively close to incomes. How the system didn't catch this is beyond me.
Sometimes just a little bit DNS research can yield a lot of useful results.
Looking at the passive DNS records for the domain chanceletikva.org shows it references the email address davidm@yeahdim.co.il.That email address is tied to multiple website registrations for a person by the name of David Margaliot, and also Shoshana Margaliot.
A search on this name in Domaintools finds the name David Margaliot tied to at least 25 domains, including ezri.org.il, which is a very odd site that features a huge image of a young child who is apparently in the hospital holding a gift wrapped box with a teddy bear. The site asks for donations but has a strange mission statement: Ezri Association promotes life-saving innovation through a surveillance drone project for emergency response teams, the establishment of an international medical knowledge database, along with other technological initiatives".
I'll probably continue the rest of this in a follow-up story.
The fact that families have to crowdfund lifesaving care creates the vulnerability but it doesn't force anyone to build an industrialized scam on top of it
Introducing “The Automatic Orphan Crusher 9000” complete with conveyor belt fed chutes and titanium jaws, no orphan can escape! Just place a piece of candy…”
That would be part of our Orphan Industries plan for managing output of your 9000s on the industrial floor. Sure. Monitor throughput and TTK right there from the app.
This framing is disingenuous. We're meant to say "tear down the orphan-crushing machine!" But in this case there's no machine, only human mortality. You're substituting a simple question ("why are we crushing orphans?") for a complex one ("who should pay for poor children's healthcare?")
No but it provides a framework to begin thinking about ways we can protect the vulnerable from these contemptible but totally predictable bad actors.
For example, families forced to publicly beg for money to provide their sick children with treatment. What societal structures enable this situation to occur? Who is profiting off of this structure?
Whether taxes, health insurance, the Church, or gofundme, technically all life saving care is mostly crowd-funded. Maybe not in some Wild West dystopia, but generally the pooling of funds seems to work better than solo funding.
Involuntary, progressive crowdfunding through government threat of violence (taxes) seems to work better than the other methods and most consider it humane. Americans have shown little interest historically in doing the humane thing, unfortunately.
There's a benefit to having a service tied to the individual receiving the service. For starters it put price pressure and competition on providing the service. When someone else is paying for something you don't have a signal of efficacy, in terms of pricing or quality.
To put another way, if I were facing some terminal illness I would want to have full control of picking the service even if it costs money. Sure, I would want "the best" specific to me and have someone else pick up the tab, but that's a fantasy, because no system or third party has as much skin in the game as me. That's why things like elective surgery are so cheap and competitive.
The problem is why do these treatments cost so much? What prevents competition and innovation. And my argument it's largely due to regulation and third party payer system
You’re confusing ideology with the way the world actually operates.
The general public doesn’t have enough information to make informed decisions when it comes to healthcare. This alone completely removes the usual market forces from providing any benefit when it comes to healthcare.
Cancer treatments don’t inherently cost that much money, the systems to ensure people are actually getting useful treatments are expensive. You can’t trust companies selling cures. You can’t trust every doctor when they have financial incentives to offer treatments. Insurance companies are in an adversarial relationship with providing treatments, which doesn’t result in efficient supervision here. Lawsuits offer some protection, but at extreme cost to everyone involved. Etc etc.
The net result of all these poor incentives is single payer systems end up being way more efficient, resulting in people living longer and spending less on healthcare.
> The general public doesn’t have enough information to make informed decisions when it comes to healthcare. This alone completely removes the usual market forces from providing any benefit when it comes to healthcare.
Why is it always "the general public" and not "I". Do you have enough information about decisions? Can I take away some of your rights? No, of course not. Everyone else is dumb except me.
I'm sorry but I refuse to believe some unelected, anonymous bureaucrat has my best interests in mind or can even know me anything about me such that I want to allow them to make health decisions for me.
The whole "anonymous bureaucrat" shtick doesn't land anymore. The purpose of having long-term non-political staff is so that operations don't change on a whim when some rogue director comes in and wants a second Ferrari. The reason government spends more AND is paradoxically more efficient is because most of the work of those bureaucrats is tracking, reporting, and reconciliation. That's the whole deal. Congress passes laws and in those laws is usually an obscene and near impossible amount of auditing.
I trust government staff far more than the decision of unregulated, greedy corporations who literally exist to extract the most money from whatever process they're trying to sell you.
Can you name someone that is a long-term non-political person that is making these decisions?
I have trouble believing empowering people who have no risk of losing their job and no one knows they exist is the best model for making decisions for other people.
Who runs Medicaid, Medicare or VA? Name the person. Who is held responsible? These are just words at this point and its an ideological battle. You have no idea.
>I have trouble believing empowering people who have no risk of losing their job and no one knows they exist is the best model for making decisions for other people.
You mean like the (non-medical doctors) third-parties contracted by my private insurance provider who routinely deny important care[0] and even reject pre-approvals for antibiotics for MRSA infections even after multiple interactions with several medical doctors confirming both the diagnosis (with accompanying pathology) and the appropriate course of treatment.
Yeah, you keep that rolled up newspaper handy so you can "Gub'mint bad! Bad Gub'mint!"
I hope you never have to deal with a life-threatening situation where your insurer flatly refuses to cover treatment until after you're dead or have body parts amputated.
> greedy corporations who literally exist to extract the most money
Every single product and service I am using in my life is made by a corporation. The clothes I wear, the food I eat, the car I drive, the PC I am making my living on.
Government?! Decaying infrastructure, lines at the DMV, crappy schools and killer hospitals.
You may trust the government if you want, but I will never. However, you are the only one pushing your choice onto me and reducing my options. I am fine with you using private or governmental services but you won't allow me this freedom of choice.
I don’t have enough information to make informed decisions here and you don’t either. Off the top of your head, how well educated is your dentist? You after all made an informed decision picking them. So how well did their background compare to others in your area. What where your concerns about their dental programs weaknesses and how was that offset by… Except no let me guess that never entered your mind did it.
> Off the top of your head, how well educated is your dentist?
My dentist cleans my teeth. If it's painful every time I come or I keep getting cavities I consider changing dentists. If they suggest I replace my teeth with veneers or something extreme, I consider someone else. And I'll do a few google searches.
So you didn’t look into their overall competence just the superficial aspects that occur to everyone. I agree that’s normal, but it’s also the underlying problem I was pointing to.
So you don’t need to continue, you just proved my point.
> I'm sorry but I refuse to believe some unelected, anonymous bureaucrat has my best interests in mind or can even know me anything about me such that I want to allow them to make health decisions for me.
I'm sorry to tell you that this is, but unelected bureaucrats are constantly making health decisions on your behalf. You may not want government bureaucrats, but bureaucrats already work in your employer's HR department, deciding on which insurer to partner with, and with what benefits. They are at your insurance company, doctors office, and hospital administration, negotiating and deciding which procedures and drugs are available to you without ever asking for your opinion. Bureaucrats you didn't vote for infest drug company's research and finance offices, determining the availability and cost of your present and future care. None of these even pretend to act in your interests.
I'd rather have some government bureaucrat preside over all the other predatory bureaucrats. I sure as hell wouldn't be make well-informed decisions in the ER, or after getting a cancer diagnosis. Further, it is impossible to compare provider quality and final costs for elective, cosmetic procedures when I'm under no time pressure or stress.
Sure, in that regard bureaucrats make sure my grocer has full shelves. There are likely dozens if not hundreds of people responsible for my local grocer just to make sure I have food.
I have no problem with bureaucrats. I want a choice. If I come in one day to find the shelves empty, I go somewhere else. If they make it difficult for me to check out, or are too expensive, I change. I just want choice.
You can choose to listen to the same unelected anonymous bureaucrats. Just log on to FDA or whatever, and follow their advice (e.g. follow the food pyramid). Only one of us wants to remove choice from the other, and that's the difference.
Time and time again large competing forces in the market are found to have colluded instead of directly competing with each other to drive price/cost down. What is it that still makes you believe that two (or n-number) of providers won't collude to charge an astronomical amount for a life-saving treatment?
Because if something sucks, someone comes up with something better and sells it for a profit. This is the history of pretty much every other good or service that is not heavily influenced by regulation and artificial barriers to entry
> Because if something sucks, someone comes up with something better and sells it for a profit.
This is basically a religious belief at this point. It's how a perfectly ideal free market might work, but we don't have any of these, especially in healthcare.
Do you not use private businesses or something? Do you not shop at a private grocer or order things from Amazon or use a private search engine?
Probably 99% of what I consume comes from private companies and the services generally get better over time, with some exceptions. Compare that to an experience with the TSA.
> Time and time again large competing forces in the market are found to have colluded instead of directly competing with each other to drive price/cost down.
Collusion and cartels never work on the long run. It's an unstable equilibrium, the incentive to reduce prices to capture more market is too great.
> What is it that still makes you believe
Competition. It's the only force keeping humans honest. That's why we must treat any barriers of entry in a market with extreme care. The only "failed" or "captured" market is a strongly regulated one.
Markets can remain irrational, or colluding, far longer than you can stay solvent (or even alive).
For example, while the Phoebus cartel only really lasted from 1925 through to 1939, 1000hr incandescent light bulbs remain the standard offering till present day. Profitable market manipulations are sticky.
The whole notion that markets are efficient is just a mathematical construct that has become very dogmatic for people. But if you look into the details, markets are efficient under the assumptions of perfect information and infinite time. Neither of those conditions are present in the real world: we neither have perfect information nor infinite time.
> 1000hr incandescent light bulbs remain the standard offering till present day
This proves in fact that all the cartel did was establish a standard, an optimal average between various tradeoffs when building an incandescent lightbulb: brightness, cost, efficiency and life span. Yes, the cartel behaved anti-competitively. The effect on the market? Nil.
> perfect information and infinite time
There is absolutely no requirement for this for markets to work. Markets work just fine with partial information and just-in time. When new information and new market participants appear, markets will self-correct. The only way to prevent markets from working is through government intervention.
In facts, free markets are the only system we have that works with incomplete info and reacts in real-time. Central planning will happily decide on incomplete info then never adapt. We saw that during communism when the Party decided allocate X resources for production of Y and it always resulted in a glut or shortages. Central planning doesn't work.
It's the obvious reality around me here in Eastern Europe. We were starving under communism before 1990 but are now enjoying the amazing wealth capitalism brought.
> it put price pressure and competition on providing the service
This is simply not true. Healthcare in the US is comparatively much more expensive than countries offering subsidized healthcare with comparable or better outcomes(1).
> it's largely due to regulation and third party payer system
Capitalism can't work in a market that's completely consolidated, and where people can't offer to not buy your service. Healthcare in publicly subsidized countries is much less expensive because it's regulated. Compare the price of simple drugs like insulin or asthma medicine if you need an easy example. Pharma companies still happily sell there, which is to say that the difference is pure profit on the back of sick people who don't have a choice.
My biggest grief against this individual payment system is moral though. I don't see the virtue in a system where kids have to put on a show to receive care. Or anyone for that matter, you'll give to a kid because they're cute and generate empathy, does it make someone ugly with no family less deserving of getting cured from cancer?
Because when you're dying you have no bargaining position. You can't just wait it out. And you're just a single client, whether you personally die or not does not meaningfully change their bottom line.
So it is a highly asymmetric bargaining situation where all the incentives are poorly aligned. Of course it is exploitative.
Okay, you have no bargaining decision when you have N providers, so we should get rid of all providers with a single provider because only then you'll be in better bargaining position.
And now your death will have a meaningful change to the career bureaucrat or politician that made the decision that led to your death.
Because power of an individual vote is much more powerful than the power to take your business elsewhere. That's if you can find out the responsible party that makes these decisions and they're not appointed but elected, otherwise you'd have to mount an influence campaign on the politicians with 90% re-election rate to change said bureaucratic leader.
All empirical evidence shows that single payer systems work better, producing far better outcomes at lower cost, than the US system. In fact, so much better that a single payer system is what Congress has chosen for itself!
But seems some prefer to believe a theoretical argument with no evidence to back it up.
“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
> All empirical evidence shows that single payer systems work better, producing far better outcomes at lower cost, than the US system.
Agreed. Also, all empirical evidence shows that free-markets work better, producing far better outcomes at lower cost than either. Just look around at any less-regulated and thus free-er markets. Or just "reject the evidence" - your choice.
> die
I am middle-aged so I used plenty of health services in my life. I always had choices when in came to price and level of care and treatment. None of them were for the "dying" case. But I do have an insurance specifically for that case. I am a rational being so I plan in advance. No need for a government bureaucrat to decide my health care for me just in case some day I may be incapacitated.
When you have to choose a provider or you die, there won’t be a real downward pressure on price because there is no need to form a cartel to feed on this. You can see this in every single market of utility or de facto utility segments.
Some people seem to exist in a bubble where they believe that nothing bad will ever happen to them or their loved ones, so paying to improve society has no benefit to themselves.
What's 'paid' to the median child in education is a pittance compared to what the payers suck back out of them in old age during social security.
Public education is largely a scam to put 'original sin' of debt of children to society so when they grow up there is some plausible explanation that "we're a society" and they must feed into the pyramid scheme.
I hear you on intergenerational stuff. I just don’t think “public education is a scam” fits what most kids actually receive.
Kids are not only getting classroom time. They inherit a whole baseline that previous taxpayers built: safer streets, clean water, courts that mostly function, vaccines, roads, libraries, stable money, and the accumulated tech and culture that makes modern jobs even possible. That bundle is huge, and it starts paying out long before anyone is old enough to “owe” anything.
Also, adults are not literally trapped. People can move, downshift, opt out of a lot, or choose different communities. Most don’t, even when they complain loudly, and to me that’s a pretty strong signal the deal is at least somewhat reasonable. Not perfect. Not fair for everyone. But not a cartoon pyramid scheme either.
If there’s a real fight worth having, it’s making the burdens and benefits less lopsided across generations, not pretending the whole social investment in kids is fake.
But charitable causes perpetuate the problems by creating an industry around them rather than trying to find solutions for them. You can’t trust industry to solve civil problems like healthcare or housing, since they shouldn’t be problems in the first place. Its like trying to trust the free market to keep people from raping and killing each other—people will rape and kill with or without the market! Some level of coercion is necessary that free market principles cannot employ.
This isn’t about free market vs single payer healthcare. These kids are from poor countries. Unless you’re arguing for rich countries to offer literal worldwide healthcare.
> It's likely caused by the very same thing that causes human beings to
We’re not billiard balls. We have agency. Nothing causes a human being to choose to commit immoral acts vs. immoral acts. A human being may be put in a situation that may entice that person’s corrupt desires (we used to call this temptation), and responsibility while mitigating culpability is possible when someone’s rational faculties are overwhelmed, but the choice remains.
Blaming systems for theft is scapegoating and an evasion of responsibility. (To make this clearer by distinction: a starving man taking bread from an overstocked warehouse during a famine is not choosing to commit an immoral act; he isn’t stealing in the first place, as some share of that bread is his).
This really doesn't explain why particular places and times in history have much higher crime levels. If what you said was true then rule of law would have been the standard throughout history... it has not been.
Let’s say I have a bag of bread, and I pass them down one by one expecting people to only keep one. You decide to keep two.
The human’s reasoning is often bulletproof:
I don’t have enough. You do. I’d didn’t steal from the person next to me, I took it from someone with plenty
^ No where in that reasoning is the possibility that in the aggregate, if enough people do that, you steal from each other.
—-
Insecurity needs to be rehabilitated before any form of support can be provided. Otherwise you get toxic results. How could charity possible go wrong? Easy - bad hearts are left untreated.
Today a hope of many years' standing is in large part fulfilled. The civilization of the past hundred years, with its startling industrial changes, has tended more and more to make life insecure. Young people have come to wonder what would be their lot when they came to old age. The man with a job has wondered how long the job would last.
This social security measure gives at least some protection to thirty millions of our citizens who will reap direct benefits through unemployment compensation, through old-age pensions and through increased services for the protection of children and the prevention of ill health.
We can never insure one hundred percent of the population against one hundred percent of the hazards and vicissitudes of life, but we have tried to frame a law which will give some measure of protection to the average citizen and to his family against the loss of a job and against poverty-ridden old age.
This law, too, represents a cornerstone in a structure which is being built but is by no means complete. It is a structure intended to lessen the force of possible future depressions. It will act as a protection to future Administrations against the necessity of going deeply into debt to furnish relief to the needy. The law will flatten out the peaks and valleys of deflation and of inflation. It is, in short, a law that will take care of human needs and at the same time provide for the United States an economic structure of vastly greater soundness.
I congratulate all of you ladies and gentlemen, all of you in the Congress, in the executive departments and all of you who come from private life, and I thank you for your splendid efforts in behalf of this sound, needed and patriotic legislation.
If the Senate and the House of Representatives in this long and arduous session had done nothing more than pass this Bill, the session would be regarded as historic for all time.
”
I think it's more complicated than this. People with incurable diseases are desperate and sometimes resort to unproven, dangerous and very expensive treatments. Unfortunately, most people don't have enough money for that, so in order to afford them they try to obtain donations to pursue the treatment they think will save them. Places like Turkey, China, etc are heavens for this kind of medicine.
In a similar way we can say that every shop in Amazon can create own digital shop themselves, but marketing, sales channels and distribution is not easy to acquire.
Is there even standard practices to audit the effectiveness of charity? No accountability means they will always operate like a black box, and I’ve always thought black boxes create misalignments.
Money goes in, and good feelings come out. It certainly serves a purpose, but not the intended one.
Yes, it's called Form 990 and it is a requirement to publish it on a yearly basis to retain non-profit status. You can search for any US-registered NGO here for example: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/
To put it in HN terms, this is what people here like to use to shit on Mozilla for how much they pay their executives while having zero insight into how much Firefox's for-profit competitors pay their executives.
> To put it in HN terms, this is what people here like to use to shit on Mozilla for how much they pay their executives while having zero insight into how much Firefox's for-profit competitors pay their executives.
It's dubious to say Google "competes" with Mozilla, because they pay Mozilla to develop Firefox to avoid antitrust issues, but it's easy enough to find CEO compensation for public companies.
Also, "Other companies pay their CEOs ridiculous amounts, so we're going to," is a poor justification, and just shows Mozilla execs are there to enrich themselves, and don't really care about the browser or community. But I guess they can't spend all of the money on Pocket and AI.
The IRS can audit the reporting, and if you lie on egregiously you can even go to jail. Granted that is very rare, and we currently have an anti-IRS administration, but that’s the basic enforcement mechanism.
The same people that audit your taxes, roughly with the same consequences for lying. Except the IRS is far more likely to send unannounced auditors to NGOs than they are to send them to for-profit companies or individuals. It's more of a hassle to get/retain tax-free status than it is to simply pay your taxes like everyone else (as it should be).
> Is that it?
Let me guess: you haven't clicked on "view filing", which leads to a roughly 20-pages-long document.
Do any real* societies have health care systems where everyone who needs cancer treatment gets the best available?
* by real, I mean large societies that aren't propped up by some bizarre economic quirk...eg maybe the sultan of brunei can personally pay for everyone bruneian citizen to get the best cancer treatment. But that's not a scalable solution
Whether or not non-productive individuals who don't do any work can own the means of production and reap the majority of the economic surplus from it is somewhat tangential to the question of who pays for whose healthcare.
There are plenty of capitalist nations that provide public healthcare on a large spectrum of coverage and quality.
In terms of waiting times to see a doctor or specialist (the only cases where stats for the US seem to be available), the US looks a touch better than average in waiting times for healthcare within comparable countries: https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/health-at-a-glance-2025....
Ahead of Canada, sure (they come worst here in both scenarios) but behind countries like the UK, Germany & the Netherlands that do have universal health care.
I prefer that over people having to start a GoFundme whenever they get sick. My relatives in Germany get necessary treatment as needed. There is the myth of no wait times in the US but from my experience there are also of wait times here.
The boy with cancer who is a main subject of the article and was scammed out of desperation to raise funds to cover his healthcare is in The Philippines.
"Aljin says treatment at their local hospital in the city of Cebu was slow, and she had messaged everyone she could think of for help."
The Philippines' constitution says access to healthcare is a human right. They have universal healthcare insurance, and public hospitals and medical centers.
The next one is the girl from Colombia. Colombia has a mostly public (with regulated private) healthcare system with universal health insurance.
The next one is from Ukraine. Ukraine has a government run universal healthcare system. Wikipedia tells me "Ukrainian healthcare should be free to citizens according to law," fantastic, but then it goes on, "but in practice patients contribute to the cost of most aspects of healthcare."
In first world countries with social healthcare systems like Canada and Germany and Australia, people with complex illnesses do not get coverage for unlimited treatments either, or general costs of being sick (travel, family carers, etc). There are many cases of fundraisers for, and charities which try to help, sick people in need in these countries.
Capitalism is not the reason not everyone with cancer is being cured and not chasing expensive treatments. Healthcare is something that you can throw unlimited money into. You'll get diminishing returns, but there will always be more machines and scans and tests and drugs and surgical teams and devices you can pay for. It doesn't matter the economic system, at some point more people will get more good from spending money on other things, and those unfortunate and desperate ones who fall through the cracks might have to resort to raising money themselves.
If you think there aren't long waits for non-emergency treatment in the US, you are lucky or a moron.
I needed a sleep study. An inpatient sleep study is booked 3 years out here. Good insurance.
Seeing that sleep study doctor in the first place just to get sent a $150 gadget that listens to me sleep? I waited two months. The follow up appointment? 3 months.
Do you know why non-emergency care waits that long? Efficiency. Turns out, hospitals want to not spend extra money on doctors they don't need whether they get paid by the government or this weird industry called "insurance" we have developed.
Go head, tell me about how you can get any treatment or any scan in a week without fail in our wonderful overpriced system.
In the US, twenty day wait list for a broken toe, seven month wait list for a neurologist, five month wait list for a deviated septum surgery, and good luck finding a PCP taking new patients.
This quality of service costs me and my wife ~$23,000/year.
Sure, we can walk into urgent care and get seen. I've also never had a problem walking into a walk-in clinic in Canada, either. The clinic's lobby and the doctor's car in the parking lot isn't as nice over there, though.
In capitalism it is easy and transparent: price, with the side effect of aligning society interests with those of the selfish individual.
Of course the strange and heavily regulated US health-care system is obviously far far away from a free market.
In socialism it's much more random: black markets, lists, lotteries, friends and network of connections. The side effect is that the most productive individuals are discouraged and punished, with the whole society lagging in effect.
Case in point: the EU that started lagging the USA so much in growth that ended up having to beg for basic defense when a blood-thirsty neighbor came hungry for land.
When I'm unconscious in an ambulance, I'm definitely in a position to appreciate all that price transparency the free market has provided, so I can rationally weigh up all my options calmly and objectively while my organs are shutting down.
The great majority of health care is not emergency health care. Actually, the fact that emergency health is so expensive is quite the incentive for preventive medicine. And for the rest, insurance is necessary. Like for house fires or floods: I get the insurance but I also check my wires and pipes regularly.
Can't think of a socialist country, but invite you to visit the German system. Significantly less costly for society and objectively better for the people falling ill (or just having a baby born).
And no, no lists, no lotteries or any of that other lies the conservative US media is spewing out to keep the masses pacified.
I strongly believe, that if US citizens were to experience German healthcare for a year and having to go back to the US system, that there would be riots. Because I don’t think anyone with first hand experience of both systems would ever want to return to the US system.
Yep, loving my gesetzliche Krankenkasse (public health insurance, which is more like "highly regulated insurance"), even more than I liked the Privatkrankenversicherung (less highly regulated, but still with better guardrails than a lot of things I've seen in the States) I was on my first decade in the system here. Sure, there are some specialists who won't accept it, or who will give you a sooner appointment if you're private pay, but in that situation, you have the option of declaring that you're a self-payer that quarter, and your public insurance will reimburse in the amount they normally would have for that procedure or exam. For things like an MRI, the full retail cost in Germany is still much lower than in the US (it was about 600 EUR for my back a few years ago, while I was still privately insured, and I still had to wait for reimbursment).
Even once I do hit the income threshold to switch back to private (switching back to fulltime work), I'm pretty sure I won't.
As far as doctor choice goes, I feel like I have more on the public insurance here (like 90% of the population) than I did with UHC in the early 2000's back in the US. I certainly have fewer financial surprises.
Healthcare in the US seems to cost about double per capita what it does in other developed countries with universial/social healthcare. Public spending in US is on-par with others, and then private spending is that much again. Standard of healthcare I've heard (and would hope) is world class if you can pay, but still something seems broken there to be sure.
But you have lists, queues, lotteries, whatever you call it. That's not a lie. The fact you think lists are a vast right wing conspiracy demonstrates your government is not really forthcoming about your healthcare system. There are lists everywhere. There are ambulance wait times, hospital emergency wait times, various levels of urgent and elective treatment wait times. There are procedures and medicines and tests that are simply not covered at all.
Now, obviously USA has queues and lists too. And I could be wrong but I'm sure I've heard that US private insurance companies are notorious for not covering certain treatments and drugs as well. I don't know what it is exactly these right wing people are saying about healthcare, I thought they did not like the American "Obamacare" though.
There definitely are lists. You don't just get the surgery or therapy you need the next day. You get the next free slot in the list of people queuing at the hospital/practice that still has free slots.
For example the first appointment you can get at my state funded therapist if you call today, will be in june. How is that "not a list"?
Or like, if you call most public GPs in my neighbourhood, they'll all tell you they're full and don't have slots to take on any new patients and you should "try somewhere else". How is that "not a list"?
There are multiple lists here in the NL. I called for a surgery and got put on the fast list (she said that if it weren’t urgent, it would be over a year wait). Your doc has a lot of influence on how urgent things are and how far you are willing to travel. I got in to see a therapist in a matter of weeks, because I was willing to travel out of the city; otherwise it will be months. The doc can see the lines and give you recommendations; all you have to do is ask to be seen sooner.
Doesn't work like that in Austria. Or my doctor's were unwilling to fake urgency to bypass the waiting system for me.
Anyway, do you not realize the fault with the system in your logic? Because if everything becomes urgent in order to bypass queues, then nothing is urgent anymore.
It doesn't fix the problem, you're just scamming the system to get ahead of the problem.
In my case, there was no faking urgency. I was pointing out that urgency puts you in a different line that gets priority (basically, cancellations from the longer line).
For some other things, you can travel further away to where there is less demand for what you need, and if you're willing, you don't have to wait as long. These are all different "lines" and they're the ones doing the schedule.
I wish I could have waited one year. 0/10, would not recommend that proceedure. FWIW, it's a very common, usually also scheduled long in advance (even in the US). Pretty much every man has to get one over 40; so it makes sense the wait list is long unless you've got something else going on.
>Ok but urgency is a different kettle of fish. Life threatening cases get urgency everywhere and immediate care everywhere.
Except it doesn't. At least not in the United States. I have Peripheral Artery Disease.
I had two completely occluded arteries in my left leg and a third that was mostly occluded and had an aneurysm to boot.
One day, that third artery collapsed and I was left with zero blood flow to my left foot.
The doctor had me go to the Emergency Room to get testing and imaging to have surgery the following week.
He did not simply schedule surgery, as that would have required pre-approval from my insurance company and, in fact, the insurance company denied the claim and did not approve the procedure (which saved my foot) until six weeks later -- at which time I'd have had to have my foot amputated without the angioplasty and arterial bypass.
In fact, after surgery the insurance company continued to deny my claims and refused to authorize pain meds (they sliced my left leg open from my hip to my ankle and rooted around to use an existing vein to bypass the blockage on one of my arteries) for those same six weeks.
Oh yeah, US healthcare is so much better. /rolls eyes. My insurer would have forced me to wait until I required amputation if I hadn't just gone ahead on an emergency basis as suggested (because it's not unusual for that to happen) by the surgeon.
And in case you were wondering, yes I have private insurance and pay nearly $1200/month just for me. In fact, my deductible for next year just went up 20% and my annual out of pocket doubled, yet I'm still paying essentially the same premium.
No. The US healthcare system is completely fucked and I hope you don't die or lose important body parts learning that.
They do? If they misdiagnose something, you can end up in the slow line instead of the fast one, or vice versa. Compared to them, you have no influence.
That's the difference between a corrupt and non-corrupt system rather than a capitalist vs socialist one. Nearly all European countries have an at least somewhat socialist healthcare system but in most you don't have to resort to those tactics.
the market / capitalism won’t correct itself, much people want to call it God/ perfect
Regulation, anti-trust laws try to correct somethings but many politicians are against those things because they limit the profit that can be made, profit first, that’s the corruption
> In socialism it's much more random: black markets, lists, lotteries, friends and network of connections. The side effect is that the most productive individuals are discouraged and punished, with the whole society lagging in effect.
Evidence: the vast majority of European countries who have socialized medicine and seem to be doing fine.
> the vast majority of European countries who have socialized medicine and seem to be doing fine
You do realize that the "vast majority" of European countries doesn't mean highly developed Western Europe, right?
Here in Central and Eastern Europe (where I live) socialized medicine is not "fine". You should visit some hospitals in Bulgaria or Romanian to get a more complete picture. We pay the state outrageous insurance costs every month then go and pay out-of-pocket in private hospitals when we actually need them.
>>In socialism it's much more random: black markets, lists, lotteries
>Evidence: the vast majority of European countries who have socialized medicine and seem to be doing fine.
That evidence of socialism working well, only works as long as there are enough resources to cover the needs of most people, basically some of the wealthier European countries.
But when those resources become scarce due to poor economic conditions and/or mismanagement, then you'll see the endless queues, black margets and nepotism running the system.
Evidence: former European communist countries who experienced both systems and where in some, nepotism to bypass lists still work to this day.
I think the 2024 Economics Nobel disproves this. It showed that nations with strong institutions create wealth - and it was a causative link they proved, not simply correlation.
How does that disprove what I said about abundance or lack thereof in socialized systems? Feels like an orthogonal issue.
Socialized systems don't work without abundance. How you generate that abundance is orthogonal to socialism since even countries that are wealthy on paper suffer from shortages and long waiting times in public healthcare leading to a gray-market of using connections to get ahead or more private use.
Both are true. Because when the abundance runs out, people start using nepotism to get what they need. You can see it in the tech job market now. More and more good jobs are only through networking. Meritocracy alone was enough during the times of abundance.
Rather, crony capitalism with no real competition (cartelisation in the absence of strong regulation). This invariably leads to Imperialism ... We see this with BiGTech today and the phenomena of "digital imperialism".
Capitalism is the reason those treatments exist in the first place. I don't see many cutting-edge cancer treatments coming out of Cuba, North Korea or Venezuela.
Market economy. Capitalism is a name for the bad thing-- "the accumulation of capital by some to the exclusion of others". Those who argue for a market economy usually claim that with their rule, it won't be accumulation of capital by some to the exclusion of others, with them assuring us that there will be free markets and competition.
Both actual capitalism, i.e. the bad thing, and this which can plausible be argued to be well-functioning market economies, are is often stabilized by adding elements of communism to the system-- publicly funded education, healthcare etc. This is one of the reasons why I as a vaguely socialism-influenced whatever I can reasonably be said to be see communism, i.e. a system characterized by the distribution principle "to each according to his need" as less revolutionary than the socialism distribution principle "to each according to his contribution". Communist distribution principles can coexist with ill-functioning market systems such as things which have degenerated into actual capitalism, whereas the socialist distribution principle can't.
Even in a pure unadulterated market economy that doesn't publicly fund healthcare you would expect to be able to protect yourself from high-impact low-likelihood events by means of an insurance. I find it hard to describe the US healthcare situation as anything other than a market failure
> I find it hard to describe the US healthcare situation as anything other than a market failure
The market is just reacting to the regulatory environment and all the political patches and shortcuts of same done to appease voters over the last 100 years. Fix that and the market will sort itself out.
Basically the US has mixed the worst aspects of for profit healthcare with the worst aspects of socialized healthcare. It underperforms while still costing obscene amounts of money.
I was shooting heroin and reading “The Fountainhead” in the front seat of my privately owned police cruiser when a call came in. I put a quarter in the radio to activate it. It was the chief.
“Bad news, detective. We got a situation.”
“What? Is the mayor trying to ban trans fats again?”
“Worse. Somebody just stole four hundred and forty-seven million dollars’ worth of bitcoins.”
Probably, but that isn't really something I say anything about in what I wrote. Instead, what I wrote is basically a terminology quibble with the use capitalism instead of market economy.
I don't think your statement is true absolutely, I think it's very possible to have pure market economies that are quite well-functioning, i.e. not monopolies etc., where many people are very rich but with some people being really poor, even to the point of not being able to afford healthcare or healthcare insurance, so I don't think it's guaranteed to be true, though I think it's mostly true.
> Communist distribution principles can coexist with ill-functioning market systems such as things which have degenerated into actual capitalism, whereas the socialist distribution principle can't.
You won't have to worry about distributing advanced cancer medications when they don't exist in the Communist version, because they weren't discovered. You can't fulfil a need with a drug you never risked a giant amount of funding and effort to discover.
It can be, but who decides what to work on? Capitalism puts risk and reward off to the side, to be done by experts. Why take the risk if you have no reward, and, conversely, why give someone a load of money to allocate if there's no risk for them if it fails?
the problem is your framing of the problem, not the questions you posed. it seems to me like you’re assuming that the only metrics for risk and reward are profit and cost. let me put it this way: do you find there to be any intrinsic value to the invention of antibiotics, or is such a development only worth the money that it can make for its inventor / discoverer? do you think that the cost of developing such technologies is worth it even if it does not gain any material income?
Let’s also imagine the other side of the equation. Can you not imagine any penalty or cost other than bankruptcy? Let’s say you are forced to allocate $1 million per year to research. is the only cost function you can imagine based on the risk of default?
I would say your problem is the framing :) You're assuming an outcome because you know antibiotics work. What is the incentive to spend $10m on research for a particular drug? It's not "because we know it ends up in a cure for X", because we haven't done the research yet. It's "because we think this will reach enough people to be useful and we'll commit a lot to this thing vs lots of other options."
You literally have the communist distribution principle for education at the primary level in the US, and it's a stabilizing element that allows you to stabilize your system despite having one of the harshest market economies in the world.
So I don't understand how your comment really relates to mine. My comment is basically me quibbling about terminology with the terms capitalism and market economy.
"the accumulation of capital by some to the exclusion of others"
This allows decentralised decision making for large grained resource allocation - for example should we build a factory for shoes, or for toothbrushes? - and is a good thing, as central planning has been demonstrated to not work if applied to the whole economy. (the converse, no central planning to any of the economy, has also been demonstrated to not work!)
However that accumulation can be (and nowadays usually is) orchestrated by a corporate entity, which in an ideal world would be almost entirely beneficially owned by retirees on an equitable basis.
What has gone wrong, is that the benefits of productivity enhancements (since 1970?) have flowed to capital more so than to workers - which not least prevents them from forming capital themselves (savings/pensions), hence rising wealth inequality.
Maybe, and you really believe that, then you do believe in capitalism as Louis Blanc defined it, even though he invented it as a way to characterize something which he regarded as bad.
But this kind of thing, i.e. capital accumulation by some to the exclusion of others, is, I think, objectively problematic in that it's not really compatible with free markets since capital ownership will be barrier to entry once capital has in fact been accumulated by some to the exclusion of others.
I agree that it is decentralized though, but sort of like how feudalism is decentralized.
What are you suggesting is the alternative? Please don't reference small homogenous countries the size of Minnesota as something that will work for the US.
I am curious: how else would you fund them? I sometimes donate & follow such cases and cancer treatments are expensive, especially experimental, custom ones. Worse, the rarer and more aggressive the disease - the more expensive the treatment and the slimmer the actual chances.
Thanks. I never understood why intelligent people, comparing for example the German to the US system can even blink and decide that the German system doesn’t work.
Yes, there is quite a bit to improve in the German system. No doubt there. But if I compare it to the abysmal situation in the richest country on this planet, I am left standing awestruck asking myself why. I really, genuinely cannot wrap my head around.
It's largely not up to people. 59% of Americans support Medicare for All[1], including over 1 in 3 Republicans, but how many politicians even talk about it?
If you vote republican, you do not "support medicare for all" no matter what you say to the poll.
Your vote has consequences, and republicans have been voting for people who objectively and loudly tell their voters that they have no intention of doing those things.
It's time for people who vote republican to own that they suck at picking who to vote for.
Tons of them also say they want recreational weed, but it's only republicans working to prevent that in most states, often literally ignoring citizen's initiatives and court cases to accomplish that.
I would take my insurance over public German healthcare in an instant. I would not trade.
Now maybe when I stop working that may be a different comparison. And its not like there is a choice, voting for a D doesn't magically get German healthcare.
That doesn't say how you would fund it, only what form of insurance is in place.
If the US were to shift to that model today, a country already heavily in debt would have to either take on more debt PR increase revenues in a manner that they wouldn't have been willing to in order to fund our already growing debts.
The debate over whether public or private healthcare is better is all well and good, but first we should be debating how the US would pay for it in the first place.
A Single-Payer-System would also be cheaper in the US. Nobody expenses as much on administrative cost, nobody pays so much as a % of GDP on Healthcare as you, still you have the worst health outcomes of all developed nations.
Taking into account both the costs of coverage expansion and the savings that would be achieved through the Medicare for All Act, we calculate that a single-payer, universal health-care system is likely to lead to a 13% savings in national health-care expenditure, equivalent to more than US$450 billion annually (based on the value of the US$ in 2017). The entire system could be funded with less financial outlay than is incurred by employers and households
Looks like I don't have access to the full paper, but I would be extremely skeptical of any claims with such accuracy or certainty.
The healthcare industry in the US is massive and already full of corruption and inefficiency. Even if we are to assume giving politicians and bureaucracy more control over the system will reduce both issues, we can't predict how successful that will be.
Similar claims were made regarding the hopes for ACA reducing costs and here we are.
You are, of course, aware that the current US single payer system (Medicare) subcontracts their administration to private health insurance companies? And that the "overhead" typically discussed when talking about Medicare doesn't include said companies but is instead only the overhead of what it takes to shovel money from the IRS to private insurance companies?
No, this is not Medicare Advantage, in which Medicare just directly pays private health insurance premiums for enrollees.
There's also an often-overlooked issue, which is that some of the crowdfunded treatments are for things deemed "experimental" or whatever other label and thus not covered for even an insured person. This situation exists in both public and private healthcare systems. I'm not arguing in favor of a for-profit system with this, but people often miss this when they haven't personally run into uncommon health problems.
If a treatment isn't approved yet, you can usually submit a request for getting it paid.
You need to show that it has a chance of working (literature etc...) and it will be reviewed by a doctor from the "Medical Service" which is independent from the Health Insurers.
If they decide it should be paid, it will be paid (which is most of the time the case).
Otherwise you can go through the social courts. (No court costs for the insured person. You can get a lawyer reimbursed if you're poor)
Interesting. Do people win in any significant number of cases, or is it more like the "appeals" process in for-profit systems, where it's supposedly possible to win but generally does not happen?
From my limited experience it usually already gets approved by the Medical Service.
Especially within the University Hospitals who administer these treatments they already have the experience how to write these applications and know their counterparts
Expensive health treatments can easily bankrupt any western government. None of those developed countries can afford to spend their money indiscriminately on them. So instead they turn to waiting lists, death panels and very often saying no but not in your face (since that is politically frowned upon) but thought delays and countless committees and bureaucracy until the patient expires...
I know that's what you hear and read on Fox News and other "News Sources" daily.
But here in Germany, there are no "death panels" or long waiting times for cancer treatment.
Also we don't need "pre-auth" and other Bullshit before we start standard treatments.
The real death panels are sitting in your Insurance Companies Offices as seen by the news coverage around United Healthcare et al lately
I live in Eastern Europe and my "news sources" are friends in hospitals asking us to donate for desperate causes.
Governments-paid treatments are god-sent but many times the funds are limited so they only cover older, cheaper treatments. Approval and funds for newer ones come so late, sometimes too late.
Germany has one of the most developed economies on the planet so naturally has more spend on healthcare. But that can change and when the money is tight, tough choices have to be made. I'd make those choices for myself rather than trust the State to do it for me.
For a country with a $4.5 trillion GDP, a 6 billion deficit is a drop in the bucket and easily covered from taxes. It’s just a political question of what you want to fund.
For comparison, the New York City public transport system (MTA) runs a deficit of about $3 billion. Six billion for universal healthcare in a country of 83.5 million people seems like a total bargain.
To help you think a bit more clearly: the health insurance system is not a for-profit system, even though some people mistakenly hold on to the idea that it should be. It is a risk spreading mechanism.
I lived under the very system this principle enabled and I can tell you that without the profit motive we were cold and starving since there was no motivation for people to work and sew clothes or grow food.
I live under a system where even very expensive treatments are covered by the state using taxpayer money, and I'm not starving. Sometimes you need to optimize for human dignity.
10 Billions of that deficit are coming from the State paying insufficient contributions for unemployed insured people. It is a policy choice to offload those costs onto Publicly-Insured-People (excluding rich and healthy people) instead of funding them through taxes (including those groups).
The German Healthcare System also has some historically developed peculiarities that don't make much sense in today's age, but they are difficult to address without pissing people off (The duality of Private and Public Health Insurance, allowing the first one to get rich and very healthy people out of the risk pool, and then loopholes to switch back into the public system when they grow older and don't want to pay the then high prices in private insurance)
The Hospital Reform is already working to reduce costs by reducing the number of small hospitals, and concentrate them into bigger ones. (As a side effect, quality of care will increase too, since outcomes are correlated with experience)
Also more care will be shifted to outpatient setting.
Otherwise we are fighting with the demographic change. But these problems are also hurting all other developed nations including the US, where funding problems in Medicaid are also expected in the next decades
tl:dr We have problems due to the demographic change, but these are in line with other developed nations. There are some efforts to address them, but politicians are hesitant to do real reforms, because old people have the most voting power
I am yet to see any western nations go bankrupt for universal healthcare.
I have three second-hand cancer experiences from family here in Australia (Dad, Mum and my half-sister - under 35/yo). All three were detected early thanks to regular checkups and screening (covered under Medicare), treated in major hospitals (Dad was in a rural hospital, Mum and half-sister in Metro major city hospitals) and are all alive and certainly not in debt. The biggest cost was parking at the hospital, drinks from the vending machine and the PBS medication (all PBS medicine costs $31.60 for adults, and $7.70 for concessions).
Any PBS medication has the full-cost price printed on the label for reference, more often than not the printed prices go from $300 - $2,000, but I remember that these aren't the full price anyway since our government collectively bargains for cheaper prices on OS medication).
I can't imagine having to pay for treatment AND the insane full price of medications, it must be so much more stressful for families going through cancer treatment.
Americans, don't let the media and your government tell you otherwise. Universal healthcare is cheaper [0] and more effective than whatever archaic system you have now.
I am so god damn proud of our system in Australia, it's not perfect, but damn it's so efficient for critical care, thank heavens for Medicare and the PBS.
Oh and for those that say "well doctors aren't paid very well"... they are. My brother-in-law is a surgeon and he's doing pretty well for himself, bought a new Audi last month for his wife, heading to Europe for a month-long holiday with his family and just moved into a new house.
> So then you would expect life expectancy in the US to be higher than in Germany, France, UK?
Pretty soon, actually. EU countries are falling further and further behind economically. Health care costs are increasing, taking up an ever increasing slice of the government budget. Labor force participation rate is decreasing due to generous welfare and high taxes. Natality is plummeting. Attempts to increase retirement age are met with riots.
We're a technological backwater. AI research is done in USA and China - the benefits will mainly go there too. We can't even cool our cities: we're losing more people every year to heatwaves than the USA to gun violence. We're closing down nuclear power plants after years of shamelessly funding the Russian war machine for cheap energy.
Years of redirecting defense spending into social programs are coming back to bite us. Russia is hungry and aggressive, while the US is not protecting us anymore. What do you think will be the life expectancy under drone and rocket attacks?
Get real, even the poorest districts in the UK have the same average life expectancy than in the US
American life expectancy compares extremely unfavourably with the UK. The English seaside town of Blackpool has been synonymous with deep-rooted social decline for much of the past decade. It has England’s lowest life expectancy, highest rates of relationship breakdown and some of the highest rates of antidepressant prescribing. But as of 2019, that health-adjusted life expectancy of 65 (the number of years someone can be expected to live without a disability) was the same as the average for the entire US.
Also what you conveniently forget to mention, all European countries still spend less on Healthcare than the US, as a percentage of their GDP.
In absolute numbers this comparison would look even worse
So this isn't Defense Spending redirected to Healthcare
Private/public here in Japan works okayishly well. I have never heard of anyone getting bankrupted over medical bills, and have had loved ones going through surgeries and other complex issues.
I don't know, are your opinions about life and reality made up or you're just so credulous you are repeating whatever you see on social media?
Is it so hard to believe in today's day and age that somebody tries to learn and understand how the world around works using observation, published facts and deduction from as close to first principles as possible?
Is there a legitimately good reason for all those treatments to be so expensive, or is that, to a large degree, capitalism extracting capital from the market? Why is American insulin so expensive when compared to that from other countries?
> Is there a legitimately good reason for all those treatments to be so expensive
We can't really know, since only free markets can determine the price of a good or service (it's driven by supply and demand) and health care market is tightly regulated.
> Why is American insulin
Because of the regulatory barriers not allowing other providers to enter and sell insulin on the US market.
Theres a (now old) memo that specifically outlines which talking points carry most salience amongst the audience. Those terms are present here in your comment. (Luntz - The language of Healthcare 2009)
Even with waiting lists, people get healthcare. They get better health outcomes per $ spent. America can provide excellent cutting edge healthcare, which is especially great if you can afford it. At some point, you have to decide whether having most of the bell curve taken care of, is more / less important in terms of rhetoric and priority.
No, the root cause is that cancer exists. Or rather, that humans exist at all.
It's all very well and dandy that you can say "actually, there is a larger structural problem underlying it all" when meeting something bad, but it doesn't make that particular bad disappear.
We have over the years raised billions (maybe trillions) for cancer treatments and we seem to have made negligible progress in actually curing cancer. Will it ever succeed? So maybe there is a root cause for your root cause?
Unfortunately "cancer" is a very broad brush that covers a multitude of diseases.
Plus the phrase "cure" does a lot of heavy lifting. People seem to see a win here as being "here's a tablet, all cancer is gone."
So yes, we have spent an insane amount of money that can be ascribed to "cancer". (We've Also spent a lot on heart disease, diabetes and so on.)
But yes, we have got an extraordinary return on money spent. Treatments and survivability of common cancers (breast, prostate etc) have gone through the roof. Better screening, better education and much better Treatments lead to much (much) better outcomes.
Not all cancers are the same though. Some are harder to treat. Some rare ones are hard to investigate (simply because the pool is too small) but even rare cancers get spill-over benefits from common ones.
In terms of "cure" - that's not a word medicals use a lot anyway. Generally speaking we "manage" medical conditions, not cure them. "Remission" is a preferred word to an absence of the disease, not "cure".
In truth, we all die of something. Cancer is usually (not always) correlated with age, and living longer gives more opportunities to get cancer in the first place. So it's not like we can eradicate it like polio.
There are more than 200 known types of cancer, and most are very fundamental and serious. It's not something which can be easily prevented or even fixed by just taking some pill or eating different. Yet, progress has been very phenomenal over the decades. Cancer can be cured to some degree, people can survive, but progress goes type by type.
According to this US government site, 5-year survival rates across all cancer sites have improved from 50% to 75% between 1974 and 2017. (For men it started at more like 40%).
That’s not utterly transformative but I wouldn’t call it negligible either.
The brain cannot function outside the body. The brain needs your bone marrow to make red and white blood cells. The kidneys and the liver to filter and break down metabolic waste. Various other hormonal systems that affect how the brain works (c.f. the HN favorite "gut-brain axis"). A brain separated from the body could survive for a few weeks, but long term it would certainly die from neuron loss (i.e. dementia).
I'm still waiting for the tech world to wake up and realise that the online ad machinery and user tracking software that the brightest minds of our generation have been working on are just a way to efficiently connect scammers with their unsuspecting victims.
Oh, they know that. It's very lucrative. At this point it's scams all the way up to the US presidential cryptocurrency.
However it's also a tricky business to be the adjudicator of what is and isn't a scam. You're going to have to deal with a lot of complaints from "legitimate businessmen".
I'm waiting for the non-tech world to wake up and hold companies that act as willing accomplices liable for the crimes they tolerate on their platforms.
The tech world knows this. They are raking in money off of these scams. People with a rudimentary moral compass leave, those without stay, which makes it even less likely that industry will self-sanitize. The rest of society, out of survival instinct if nothing else, will have to force it to stop anti-social and fraudulent practices. Same as many other industries.
I'm waiting for the tech world to realize that "the brightest minds of our generation" don't actually work at google, because if you are that enormously bright you don't want to work for ads or in an opaque megacorp.
Why does anyone think a brilliant mind would enjoy that? So they could make a little bit more money?
Do you honestly think brilliant people, the smartest of our generation, care about money?
IME, Google software devs aren't even the brightest minds in the parking lot.
Completing large engineering projects says nothing about individual capability, and nothing about how Google deploys shitty AI moderation and about how Google employees insist it's great and perfect and never does anything wrong gives me any reason to believe they are even competent.
It's literally a meme that people started repeating in earnest without a second thought.
Don't you think a brilliant person would work somewhere, like, interesting?
In economies where you aren't rewarded for individual competency (because software management couldn't pick out individual competency if it screamed at them), highly competent people aren't going to play the game, they are just going to find something to pay the bills and work on hobbies.
The smart people are often where the money isn't, because they are rarely driven by monetary pursuits.
There was a period when I was constantly showered with these ads whenever I visited YouTube. It quickly became clear that it was some kind of scam, but YouTube didn't do anything about it for years.
Yes, which is one of two reasons why I use a blocker called adnauseum. It an adv locker that “clicks” on every single ad it sees, as well as hides it from my view. This makes my ad profile useless, and also costs them money.
The question is, is the scammer taking donations from kids with cancer or Google the more worthy entity to profit from the situation? It's a tough decision.
you should probably think about the fact that ad platforms expect and design for fraudulent and bot clicks before you assume that this actually costs anyone money.
I have a theory that it doesn't. Which set of companies' logic is more likely?:
Is LadyCailin a "tree-hugging liberal"? LadyCailin clicked on a lot of Sierra Club and PETA ads, so yes. Good, we will add LadyCailin to this list.
Is LadyCailin an "extremist right-wing nazi"? LadyCailin clicked on a lot of prepper and gold ads, so yes. Good, we will *also* add LadyCailin to this other list.
OR
Is LadyCailin a "tree-hugging liberal"? Well, they clicked on these ads, so we think so, but then they clicked on these other ads, so we're not sure. Then she clicked on these other ads, now we don't have any idea.
Speaking from personal experience: Because some people have used my phone number and email address as their own, I get emails for one political party and text messages for the other political party.
It doesn't make my ad profile useless to the people sending me ads.
Give your phone number to both U.S. political parties. Congratulations you will get spammed by both. I doubt they are cross-checking.
see Meta, which is operating like a crime syndicate, leveraging higher fees on scammers "to discourage" them, retaining their impact on supply side auction prices and well knowing many don't pay with their own credit cards.
They didn't care about being a huge driver behind a genocide, why would they possibly care about people getting scammed out of cancer fundraiser donations. Once you find out that someone has worked at any point for Meta past say, 2020, you know everything you need about them.
There's no incentive for them to comply with your request. Like Facebook, scam ads are a revenue stream for Google. The profitability usually offsets any negative PR or fallout that results from these platforms turning a blind eye to the point where their budget accounts for some percentage of scam income, leaving them to pick and choose when to take action while they actively make their platform increasingly hostile to users who want to protect themselves from said ads.
They also had a pattern of loudly crying kids in the beginning of the video, I thought they were faking, after a month they changed the style of start.
Yep. Lately I've been getting dozens of scam ads for pulse oximeters being sold as Glucose meters, with a big ol' FDA logo plastered over the top of the video. A flagrant violation of regulations around medical device marketing.
Here's Google's response:
We understand you are concerned about the content in question, but please note that Google's services host third-party content. Google is not a creator or mediator of that content. We encourage you to resolve any disputes directly with the individual who posted the content.
What struck me is that when I reported an ad with an Elon Musk deepfake selling some crypto scam, I got an email back from Google saying that after reviewing the video they found nothing wrong. I don't understand how this is not actionable in court- I mean, you did act on a report, you declare you manually reviewed the content and that it's good for you? I don't get it.
Same. Even if they delete one it's usually delayed for 2-3 days. The worst part about scam ads is that they surface a day later from a different account with 0 changes to the ads themselves. You would think Google would fingerprint the assets but in the end they just don't care.
Really makes me think that the justice system should have a wide margin for discretionary sentencing. I get that in some sense fraud is fraud, but there is one thing preying on people's greed, and another preying on compassion, charity and vulnerable children in desperate need. Scams based on greed (or other vices) are in some sense limited crimes, since their success punishes what is low, but scams based on what is best in us are much wider in their social impact, since they also disincentivize what is most noble.
The argument is that scams based on exploiting goodness causes a lot more harm compared to the ones based on exploiting greed. Because it trains people that doing good deeds is not worth it (they might be scammed.) And even if the rate of such scams are low, just reading about them makes people afraid of potential consequences of doing good deeds. So I absolutely agree that such scams should have very harsh punishments, because they do not only have immediate consequences, but they degrade trust in our society.
Social mores are synonymous with morals and it is our social mores or our moral values that form the basis of our legal systems where we use those mores (moral values) to define the actions that fall into the categories of right versus wrong and help us define how we should treat each other and what an appropriate societal sanction should be when someone steps over the line and does something to violate our social mores or does something that we consider immoral.
By comparison it is pretty obvious that most societies have similar moral values - stealing is wrong, murder is wrong, charity is right, etc. in spite of the differences in religious interpretations that end up preventing so many of us from simply coexisting as equals.
To suggest that morals are tied to religion is simply wrong. Morals are simple rules that humans have developed over generations of interactions that allow them to apply reasonable judgements to fellow humans based on observations of how those fellow humans interact with strangers and kin.
Religions likely have as part of their foundations, an explicit acknowledgement or recognition of the societal mores that governed human interactions before any one of our ancestors invented or postulated out loud about phenomena that they all experienced but did not yet have the science or understanding of the natural world to reliably explain, thus compelling them to invent entities that controlled those phenomena. Those who chose to believe in these inventions could rest easier knowing that something somewhere was either looking out for them or they could be wary of angering that entity to prevent bad things from happening to them or their kin.
In short, morals and ethics exist outside of any religious dogma so the suggestion that they are a constraint imposed on any society through religion is simply inaccurate since it is not necessary for any person to be religious in order to hold another accountable .
”To suggest that morals are tied to religion is simply wrong.”
No one has suggested that. My comment about theocracies was referring to the way religious morals direct lawmaking in theocracies, leading to things like death penalties for homosexual acts and zero tolerance of religious critique (denial of freedom of expression and persecution of political opposition).
You started off with a suggestion that on the surface implies that morals and ethics are unrelated to perceptions or definitions of harm and intent.
>Then again, maybe we should keep ethics and morals away from law and sentencing, and concentrate on harm and intent.
Morals, our value system developed by our own experiences that determine how we as individuals define right and wrong are the foundation of ethical boundaries that we impose on the groups that we form or join. Ethics are tied to morals.
Harm and intent are judgements that we make either as individuals or as group members when we look at actions and consequences (apply our moral and ethical guidelines) so that we can determine whether sanctions are necessary and reasonable based on our own shared value system.
Then you make a statement that appears to suggest that morals and ethics are unrelated when in fact, our individual morals form the foundation of ethical constraints that we impose on the groups in our societies just as they are the foundation for our religious value systems. In your either/or proposition here you apparently separate laws from morals. I disagree because laws, which follow from our own moral values and are just codified statements defining our own ethical framework so that we can all color between the same set of lines.
>Laws can be based on ethics, but moral judgments really should not be involved in their application.
Then you impose the burden of religion or theocracy with your last statement.
This statement implies to the casual observer that since you reject morals (in the second statement) as a basis of laws in favor of laws based on ethics that those which are based on morals exist only under a theocratic framework. Since group ethics follow from shared individual mores this does not make sense.
>Unless you want to live in a theocracy, of course.
Morals, ethics, laws are entangled and require no religious framework for their application though as your examples demonstrate, it is possible to create a system where mores shared and recognized by all are subverted to serve a religious doctrine which is itself a permutation of an ethical system used to capture local groups and to impose a specific reward/sanction value system to aid compliance.
EDIT: I think that your use of "Unless" makes it easy for a reader to interpret the second statement as part of an IF/THEN type of statement implying a conclusion that you have defined in your third statement.
You're explicitly allowing ethics to form the basis of laws in the first part of your second statement and then using the "but" to disallow moral judgments as a basis. This is the IF part of the dialog.
The Unless follows and ends up defining the THEN part of the conclusion so that a reader can interpret your statements to conclude that IF ethics can be the foundation for laws THEN a system of laws based on moral judgments must form the basis for a theocratic system, of course.
Indeed! However, law is not a definition of moral right and wrong; rather, it is a spatiotemporally varying definition of societal and judicial rights, permissions and restrictions of conduct which are usually grounded in the locally prevailing morals.
Law in a democratic society is a manifestation of so-called social contracts considered binding for members of that society.
However, law in a non-democratic society can be the complete opposite, to the point of enabling immoral conduct, including but not limited to legal crime, persecution of political opponents, ethnic cleansing and offensive warfare.
It’s subjective. It’s always subjective. A person can convince themselves they’re right to conduct all sorts of heinous acts if they simply alter their perspective enough.
> maybe we should keep ethics and morals away from law and sentencing, and concentrate on harm and intent
Retribution is a real component of justice. When it's ignored, people take the law into their own hands.
Harsher sentences for despicable crimes makes sense. Automatic sentence enhancers are cruel. But automatically giving the judge the power to sentence for longer based on the victim's profile is not.
Great journalism. I hope the authorities bring this person to justice and arrest them for fraud.
I saw this ad a few months ago on YouTube and flagged it as a scam when I couldn’t find much information about the company. Never donate money through random sites. If you use platforms like https://www.gofundme.com/, at least you have the option to file a complaint if you find something suspicious.
> I hope the authorities bring this person to justice and arrest them for fraud.
They haven’t scammed nor inconvenienced a rich, well-connected person, so unlikely anything will happen. Remember that online fraud is effectively legal (10% of Meta’s revenue is from scam ads by their own estimates) as long as you only target the poor.
These scam campaigns have been going for years with people operating in the field across many countries - if there was an incentive to stop this it would’ve been done already, but since everyone’s making money why bother?
> file a complaint if you find something suspicious
Which will be piped to /dev/null, just like reporting scams on social media.
Tangentially related - If you aren’t aware, there are out of court settlement bodies which exist as part of the DSA.
If you have content which is removed, or a moderation decision you wish to dispute, you can go to one of these bodies to get it reviewed. It cannot go to dev/null.
This doesn’t address whether flagging scams resulted in action. The bigger picture is the mismatched incentives for tech. Platforms are not quite incentivized to care about responding to user complaints, and do not give out information that lets us know what is happening independently.
To get to the point that complaints are actioned, those incentives need to be realigned. The ODS pathway, if used more frequently, increases that revenue and market pressure.
The ODS system is new, and I expect it will have tons of issues to discover. I wouldn’t be surprised it it is already weaponized.
On the flip side, platforms haven’t been tested or queried in this manner before.
As a not-Israeli Jew the reluctance of the Israeli government to send alleged criminals for trial overseas doesn’t make me happy, but I also remember that there are some reasons for this.
Unfortunately many countries have blanket extradition bans. US is one of the worst - it caused a lot of tension in the past when they wouldn't extradite IRA bombers but got UK to agree to extradite anyone US wanted.
No, but the pattern of criminals of Jewish background fleeing to Israel for protection after commiting a crime, is too often to ignore.
Same thing happened in my post communist country and the neighboring country too. Perp stole tens of millons through a banking scam in the 90s, then fled to Israel because he was Jewish and claimed persecution.
At which point should the pattern be acknowledged?
And did you ask Israel for extradition? What his name was? And is this pattern actually unique to Israel or would you find other examples of people escaping to where the law can't reach them? If Israel wanted to convict a dual citizen who fled to your country, what is the required process?
No, the leaders of my country didn't try any of that. You were the first person to think about those things. I'll pass on your suggestions and hopefully everything gets resolved.
Instead of being sarcastic you could be good faith and provide further information and explore what happened and explain what do you think Israel should do differently?
>Instead of being sarcastic you could be good faith
What was bad faith? I told you what happened. I was sarcastic because your comment was redundant and didn't add anything to the conversation, only instigating.
> and provide further information explore what happened
How does that change the situation? Are you the head prosecutor of Israel and looking to rectify the situation?
>what you think Israel should do differently?
Extradite them or put them in jail over there and stop being a safe heaven for criminals.
Becuase you made an argument with a single supporting example yet didn't name any name that could be used to verify what you said and let other people judge the case nor have you explained at any point of there was any court procedure in Israel about extradition and whatever he ended up extradited. How are we supposed to disscus particulars like that? Resorting to sarcasm so fast that you aren't interested in genuine discussion. Furthermore if he wasn't extradited, you could use this discussion to make him more (in)famous.
> How does that change the situation? Are you the head prosecutor of Israel and looking to rectify the situation?
You were claiming that many criminals abuse Israel extradition system to esapce the law. I was making (implicit) claim that there is nothing special about it and if there was abduance of such cases is merely because more people in your country had means to escape to Israel than to other places. As already explained you provided a sole lacking in information example and I wanted more.
And because you were being glib, I will be too, yes for all you know I am Israel's head prosecutor.
I literally conceded that "As for the rest of them they need to be considered" (for extradition). Yes I think this conversation is at end of usefullness. Israel has good reasons form their perspective to why they give citizenship easily and pretty much all countries don't give up their citizens without good cause (I read about a case where France didn't want to extradite to Israel because they aren't part of the EU so it wasn't legal. At the end France court sentenced them, so Israel should do the same).
Everyone associated with this seems to be Jewish. Israel is a haven for criminals of all types, we just care extra about any haven for pedos and rapists, but white collar criminals are terrible, too
Yes most are really scams, often also adults that claim for their poor small children with the same sign for decades (maybe that are eternal young children, that also are stable across different parents, because they also share that across different people sometimes) or whole families, that suddenly surround you. I mean these are also poor people, but the money you donate to them, won't go to them.
Once you meet a real poor, it's obvious. You meet them outside of reasonable business hours, they are obviously a native, ashamed to ask for help and actually like to have a conversation.
Sadly, this. There are even networks. I know a person who begs on a specific interval of a subway line, has been for at least a decade, and has been pretty violent towards actual beggars who did not know the rules.
Some are genuine. People who went into debt, with health issue that prevented them from ever repaying it, fleeing from families so as not to burden them...
Smugglers who were found out, left with an unpayable amount of debt while the politicians that used to protect them went without punishment.
Some of those are also human trafficking victims (at least in Europe). There are gangs that illegally bring them over the border, force them to beg on the streets, and take the money they get.
The actual homeless people here have access to government support and shelters, those beggars don't as they're not here legally.
The first trick is having a bit of local knowledge. If (say) they're outside begging money "for food" at the same time as the local homeless shelter is serving a free dinner...yeah.
> there are some people who will dress up homeless but are actually just begging for profit.
This always reminds me of the Sherlock Holmes short story - The man with the twisted lip
> They're easy to recognize, because they're very forceful in their begging, relying more on intimidation than compassion.
This is very common in India. These so called beggars harass and target people at their weakest and happiest moments like at funerals or birth of a child, wedding or housewarming parties. I've heard of these people earning enough to own houses in multiple cities.
I think parent commenter was talking about random people "working"[1] for charities and stopping you on the street. If one wanted to donate, why would they do it through a stranger on the street and not directly to their website?
However, if you give a homeless person money and they go buy drugs, I think you effectively made them poorer. I would advise giving them food instead.[2]
[1]: Word in quotes because there is no way to verify their identities.
[2]: I've literally seen a person asking for money get offered free fries at McDonald's and denying them. Beggars don't get to be choosers.
Let them buy what they need I think. They dont have the ability to stop being addicted in 60 seconds because logic. If that were possible we could collapse the entire weight loss industry, gambling, need for AA and NA meetings, entire narco infrastructure at the click of a finger.
Yeah I admit I am in two minds. Id rather the state give them clean safe pure drugs and then help them get off the drugs with naltrexone or whatever is best.
Outside of drugs and drink they can spend it how they like. They choose the food or maybe save for a hotel night.
Not every homeless person needs or wants food at every single time. Certainly not fast food fries covered in salt that get nasty if not eaten right away, that’s not a meal.
Sometimes a homeless person needs a blanket, or a bus ticket, or just a safe place for a few hours.
If you don’t want to give money, that’s your prerogative, but don’t simply assume food. Ask.
However, understand the context: the beggar entered a McDonald's and asked clients that were currently eating for money. He got offered the fries of a woman who didn't finish them. So there was no poisoning (I think this is very much an American problem, where I don't live) possible—except if you consider McDonald's to be poison in the first place.
In my experience, people don't give cash to beggars anymore. Everyone has their reason, but I think the fact that a lot of beggars were not really in need hasn't helped. But I think many would be open to give food or donate useful objects instead (which they don't have at hand when being begged).
> However, understand the context: the beggar entered a McDonald's and asked clients that were currently eating for money. He got offered the fries of a woman who didn't finish them.
Consider the beggar’s context too. How many times per day/week must they go into that McDonald’s? Leftover fries are probably what they get offered the most. You can accept it a few times, but after a while they provide neither pleasure nor sustenance.
> In my experience, people don't give cash to beggars anymore.
Anecdotally, seems about right.
> But I think many would be open to give food or donate useful objects instead (which they don't have at hand when being begged).
Again, I agree, but I don’t think anyone asks either. One possible workaround would be to donate to your local food bank or another organisation you trust, then when asked by a beggar direct them there. Though that could be another can of worms depending on where one lives.
The person denied the fries without adding anything and left. This makes everyone who heard that the beggar didn't need food. Otherwise he'd have asked for something else (even food from the supermarket nearby).
I have on several occasions offered to pay for food at a nearby sandwich shop or fast food place for beggars who were asking for money for food. None of them accepted the offer.
I once exited an excellent Indian restaurant in San Diego with a bag of takeout food I had just picked up. Someone approached me and asked me for some money “to buy a burger”. I offered him my food bag and said it’s really good, fresh, and I just picked it up.
He took the bag, waited until I wasn’t looking, then set it down on the sidewalk and walked away. He was not interested in food, nor was he hungry.
Then why are almost all of them aggressive when I say that I won't give money but offer food instead?
You say "Ask"? I did. I just heard some rehearsed story Oh, your son is sick?" With what exactly? What kind of drugs he need, I can help? Result -> anger. I get more aggression from asking and trying to get helpfull than simply saying "no." I have tons of examples.
Why do they NEVER ask for a job? Why don't they ever offer to do the manual labor I was doing? I would be glad to let them do it and pay for it.
One time they stole my phone. A guy just came near me with a sign, put it on the table while begging, and simply garbed it and have runned away. That was end of I line for me.
Why do they reek of alcohol or drugs?
I used to offer help to people, but after they stole my phone, I just scream "NO." I never want to be stolen from again. I donate to some charities, but that is the end of the line for me. I don't want to pay a guy that is begging out of habit just to buy drugs. I don't want to pay women sedating their children or using them on the street just to earn money. Just watching them beg behind the building.
My main point is that I never could understand the aggression towards the homeless until I was stolen from. My street was filled with alcoholics living in cars, screaming random stuff, and fighting with passersby and each other.
Do you really think they want an answer, or anything else other than buying their drugs?
I was really hating people like me, but in the end I was discovered why do they react with defense and aggression. But of course I would be glad to pay for food nonetheless and try to help with anything expect money and I pay for charities that try to provide medical healthcare in places like Gaza, but I don't believe that people in London (for example) need more and places like Gaza.
Because fast food restaurants get a lot of foot traffic and they’re less likely to be aggressively thrown out. Another popular place to beg are subway stations, but that doesn’t mean they need a ticket.
Did anyone ask what the money was for? Did anyone offer to buy whatever it was they needed, even if a meal at a better place? Or was the interaction to simply offer fries (probably the least filling, cheapest, far from healthy choice that they likely have been offered dozens of times already) and then do nothing when they refused?
Who am I to judge what they do with their money? I couldnt possibly know if they are allergic to something. Also not every homeless person is an addict. Even beggars can have agency over their resources. An addiction is not for me to solve, first things first should be to cover their basic needs, only then you can work on an addiction. Money is the easiest thing to give.
You should know that for an addict, the “next fix” is the first “need” that gets met. I am not convinced it is ethical to supply money to a pipeline to drug dealers.
Weed is legal where I live. They don't fund drug dealers. They fund local business.
Though that local business currently funds some sketchy Chinese crime ring so.....
I just don't care. I'm not trying to "save" them, I'm throwing a little expendable resources at a human being and hoping it somehow makes their miserable life a little less miserable and sometimes drugs and alcohol are exactly that.
I've had half a mind to just hand out joints before, but I actually think they DON'T want that.
When I want to help "rescue" homeless people like that, I give money and resources to local institutions that know how to do it.
I really don't think panhandling has ever really fixed a homeless situation. It's not exactly a job you can put on your rental application. What do I care whether the dude who spends every day on the same street corner at 0 degrees smokes some weed or not? Why should literally anyone care? I haven't seen him in a while, so he might just be dead now.
Meanwhile the people who are "temporarily homeless" rarely get to take the good panhandling spots.
I know all too well how close I have come to that exact life, and how much people like you would sneer "Oh he's just an addict, not worth compassion"
Addiction is rarely fixed by homelessness and suffering for starters.
I dont give a shit about a pipeline of drug dealers but I give a shit about humans. They are victims of a state that let them down. Them freezing to death or whatever doesn't show them drug dealers, its simply ignoring a person in need. But doesn't surprise me that people in a tech forum have little to zero empathy or pull some tinfoil hat theory out of their ass just so they can justify not giving anyone anything.
As a former homeless person, good on you. I will say, don't feel pressured to, a chat or a nice comment actually means as much, it reminded me I was human.
Oh its usually accompanied with a chat, here in Germany often times they just need some money to stay the night somewhere. However some just tell you whatever story to get their next high. Whatever floats their boat, to me its just sad that such a rich country doesn't help them while actively making being homeless harder for them. It's almost christmas and really cold out there, I know there are so many people freezing to death. What good does my money do when I invest it into some imaginary assets or kept it on my bank forever...
Germany does help them, it just requires they either apply for work or prove that they are unfit for work. Not the most pleasant thing to do, sure, but no German is forced to beg on the streets.
This is such an uneducated and entitled comment just showing how little regular people know about this situation in Germany. Its also one of the most commonly used arguments on this topic and its simply not true.
Homeless shelters are overcrowded and extremely unhygienic. Our infrastructure isn't made for an ever-growing amount of homeless people. Law, rights and reality sadly grow appart heavily. "Die Tafel" is completely overwhelmed too. This statement might have been true 15 years ago but you should re-educate yourself on the topic.
> Homeless shelters are overcrowded and extremely unhygienic.
It's not just the hygiene. it's that in those shelters you're constantly surrounded by a few mentally ill and possibly violent people who will lash out in unpredictable ways and make life worse for everyone with their constant tics and noises making you live in constant anxiety.
If you're homeless but not mentally ill yet, then being in such an environment everyday will definitely negatively affect your sanity as your daily struggle becomes surviving the shelter, instead of working to getting back on your feet. Kind of like being locked up in a prison but from which you can leave.
So then no wonder a lot of homeless people feel safer and less stressed just living and sleeping in public areas than in shelters.
Where I live our homeless shelters are hygienic and not overcrowded (they will not go over capacity, ever, due to health code / liability reasons).
They are usually not full either. However they have a strict no drugs, no alcohol, and no fighting policy. That means a lot of people aren’t interested in going to them.
Ah good on you! You seem like a lovely person. Some absolutely do tell you a story to get a fix, and it is tricky. I visit Berlin often for work, and the sheer number of homeless people I have met and chatted to who seem to have become homeless due to a lack of mental health support is extremely sad. I suspect it will only get worse. I was lucky to be homeless in London respectfully weather wise, I can't imagine being homeless in Berlin as it is so cold.
This isn't for you as you do plenty but incase others read this, but if you happen to ever see a thick coat in a charity shop, second hand store, or thrift store (whatever you call it) and it is quite cheap, do buy it as there are many charities that take them to give to homeless people.
That can cause perverse incentives such as children taken out of school so they can beg full time, such as this - https://archive.is/32Btf five of them are now dead as a result.
True should just ignore them like reasonable people and let them freeze in winter so the authorities can pick up their bodies and dispose of them.
Did you ever buy a friend of yours a wine for birthday? Or did you go to McDonalds with your kids? Congrats you contributed to their suicide.
In some American cities I’ve noticed a lot of seemingly homeless women with kids standing on street corners, that are actually Romanian scammers (“gypsies”). People have caught them drugging their babies to make them compliant with sitting under the hot sun all day. And at the end of the day they climb into a Benz because they aren’t actually in need. It really sucks for the people who are truly in need.
These are really common in Germany as well. It is often the same people in the same places and they have business hours, coffee breaks and shift rotations.
I've worked with an organisation that was on the receiving end of a popular charity, and they definitely got something (new playground equipment for disabled children). Can't say how efficient the charity was, but there are definitely charities that don't keep all the money for themselves.
Why should somebody donate to somebody else's luxuries if they could spend it on their own luxuries?
Anyway, yes, direct donation is always better, be it to some random guy down on his luck in the street (unless they have just missed their bus and need ticket money for the next one and so for 3 years in the same bus station) or to some trusted person/group who actually does deliver the stuff to the area. Way too many random NGOs have popped up in Europe promising to do good things, just transfer money to their bank account and they will take care of it all for you.
"They were always looking for beautiful children with white skin." But most of the children in the video appear to be non-white. So they're not even good at anti-affirmative-action?
Again some Israeli connection in a scam, search google and browse "fintelegram" you will see the biggest and baddest financial crime actors are all based in israel.
So what? Every Israeli now is a scammer? Are you racist?
Do you know how many scammers are from India? Do you know how many scammers are from the US? Jeffery Epstein was from the US, is every US citizen now a pedophile?
How the country origin is related to them being scammers? They're scammers because they're shitty people, it's not related where they're from.
The vast majority of fraud have noting to do with Israel wage theft is enormous everywhere and have nothing to do with Israel, the biggest fraudsters in history (mostly scams on USA investors like Theranos and 2008 crisis) according to quick Google have nothing to do with Israel. The obvious attempts to mafacture a negative image couldn't be more obvious.
I think the kid in the article who got $27k raised in his name for cancer treatment, received $0 in cancer treatment from those funds, and subsequently died of cancer definitely got scammed.
False equivalence. In your straw man, the elephant isn't misled into believing that by posing for a photo it could be "helped," nor is it possible to communicate such an idea to an elephant. In the story, money was raised for the boy's cancer treatment, and that money was improperly withheld, denying him the treatment those funds could have provided. He was harmed by that, and by being misled into thinking he could get treatment by appearing in the video, he was scammed. Lying to the family and stating the funds weren't raised is also scamming them.
But, of course, you know that, but you would rather dig and (try to) play semantic games than admit you are wrong. Do better.
These campaings? I've paid some minimal cursory attention to 2 pretty randomly chosen charities - once i donated an old car, and another time i thought may be to subscribe to do math tutoring to children, the tutors were unpaid volunteers, and i just looked into what financial info was available for that non-profit ... well after those 2 times i've never even thought about any dealing with any non-profit, etc. and the stories in the news like when a famous radio talk show host would fund raise huge money to be later paid from his non-profit to his vacation ranch business, all in the open daylight, don't surprise me at all or all those stories of Trump's charities.
Great investigative journalism. And so, so sad that these hopeful parents were scammed. Terrible that someone could do this to a child. The conclusion doesn’t give me hope though. The alleged scam organizations didn’t respond to questions and … that’s it? No one is going to jail?
there's also "remand" or detention before trial. One example where this is common is when there's a flight risk, or a risk the subject will influence the investigation.
I am strongly against the death penalty, so I dont want to imagine a scenario in which this happened. Maybe there should be regulations in place making it so that only registered groups can start donation campaigns. Its a legislative failure. So many crimes are legislative failures...
That's probably too harsh, unless it can be proved without doubt that exactly and only due to this X (many) children died and would (with high probability) live otherwise. Thats China level of dealing with similar situations, plus probably harvesting organs for additional profit afterwards and sending bullet receipt to the family.
There are many existing punishments - go after all their wealth, family and connected business, trusts etc. Simply ban them from western financial world. Publicly shame them and make their name a curse to spit on. Properly harsh jail and making sure all inmates know who arrived, I wouldn't expect kinder treatment than pedophiles get. And so on.
I remember there was a flood of similar campaigns on Facebook a couple years ago. Multiple pages, some posts sponsored, some gaming the algorithm, very similar messaging. All about children suffering from cancer. All leading to scammy-looking domain names, some using IDNs. I had been wondering where the catch was, then got tired and just started reporting and blocking them until they stopped.
Of all the people that you can scam, why go for children with cancer. I guess you think they are an easy target because they are desperate? Pure sociopath mentality. Crab mindset.
In case any sociopath is reading this: just go for old rich people. They are also desperate because they are alone, seeing their relevancy wane, and their deaths are closer every day. A single successful scam will represent a bigger return of your invested time and effort than, compared 10 successfully scammed children with cancer. And they might not even make a fuss if you steal some money from them, it will make them look weak and it will only represent a small percentage of their wealth.
And you are less likely to be killed by a mob, as a bonus.
I mean Musk almost singlehandedly has killed hundreds of thousands of kids worldwide in 2025 alone by destroying USAID medicine and basic nutrition distribution, while it literally rots in warehouses now
If we are going to have cancer stories and gun violence stories daily in the news, shouldn't the kids dying be a daily coverage?
Credit to BBC who every few weeks does show the kids dying in the hospital but US news does not mention it anymore since the summer
Still dying. More in 2026. Even more in 2027. Even more in 2028.
Even if USAID is restored in 2029 it will take awhile to rebuild and all those dead kids aren't coming back ever.
Oh and they didn't just quietly die. They suffered for weeks, months and died
Musk did that. But yeah keep using X and buying his cars
It is disgusting that those with health issues are scammed. I do think these instances require extra time on sentences. As someone who was a regular at a cancer hospital in my life, there is nothing harder than seeing a child and a parent who are clearly going through so much at a hospital at 8am. You realise all that they have gone through the whole time, and how much their life has changed, possibly permanently. It is hard for an adult, of course it is, but children have done nothing for this to happen.
"The campaigns with the biggest apparent international reach were under the name of an organisation called Chance Letikva (Chance for Hope, in English) - registered in Israel and the US."
Chance Letikva is registered with the US IRS as a charity. They've filed a Form 990. Location is Brooklyn, NY. [1] Address is listed. It's a small house. It's also incorporated as CHANCE LETIKVA, INC. in New York State. Address matches. Names of officers not given. There's one name in the IRS filing, listed as the president.
Web site "https://chanceletikva.org" has been "suspended". Domain is still registered, via Namecheap.
Some on the ground digging and subpoenas should reveal who's behind this.
[1] https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/852...
The article says they visited both the US and Israel registration addresses and didn't find the organisation's offices. I was impressed by the amount of "on the ground digging" by the journalists here!
It's really not that hard to find someone to go to check a address, redditors do this all the time. It should be expected as basic journalism, especially with high claims.
Check an address and interview anyone resident there in a way that gets useful answers to the questions at hand.
In this instance it was a bust because no one useful was there. But if the mastermind behind the whole operation was there you’d want a professional to ask them questions. Because once they know they’ve been rumbled they’re probably going to disappear.
I am pretty sure the BBC, like most bug enough news outlets, has antennas all over the world.
Why does every discussion have to wind up with a digression thread about how "real" or, even worse, "basic" journalism is something from a sepia-tinged golden age of muckrakers getting blitzed with Dorothy Parker? People are trying. There's lots of shıt masquerading as journalism, but this ain't it.
> Why does every discussion have to wind up with a digression thread about how "real" or, even worse, "basic" journalism
Hardly surprising given the contrast to the level of journalistic integrity on display at the Beeb recently.
If only this was the actual standard for journalism and not copy pasting half understood content with additional spin.
If what you are typically reading is
>[copypasta] half understood content with additional spin
then what you are reading is not journalism.
> then what you are reading is not journalism
In most cases, if you aren't paying for it, it is not journalism.
Pretty impressive work. I always wondered what all those correspondents do that news organisations employ all over the world. I guess that's one of those things.
I’m… not sure what’s there to wonder, really. They do the exact same thing as reporters back home: journalism. Meaning write articles and do investigative work required for writing articles, whether going to press conferences, finding people to interview, or something like this, called investigative journalism.
A news piece in a foreign affairs section is likely to have been written by a correspondent because that’s what their job and specialty is. If it’s an op-ed or a commentary or analysis piece, even more so. It’s not like you can do good journalism without boots on the ground, no matter how connected the world is these days.
I agree - I noticed this as well. Also feels like it such an upsetting story that someone was motivated to really to the bottom of it. They also probably knew that if the story got traction people would be running down there own checks.
I mean it does feel like that should be standard operation for journalism on bigger stories but I think our expectations from journalists have really fallen over the last 5 years with all the slop coming in.
The behavior that this article outlines is outrageous. But it makes me uncomfortable for this to be the kind of place where anonymous strangers self-investigate lurid allegations against random accused, no matter how disturbing the allegations.
Most of us don’t have the tools or the time to do it properly, at least on here; and that can end badly [0]. It rarely achieves a thoughtful considered outcome, and there are other places to do that kind of thing if you want to—some of those communities, like Bellingcat, seem pretty well-practiced in their methodologies, and their findings seem to have accordingly high impact.
[0] e.g. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-22214511 … and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_of_Sunil_Tripathi
The fact that the website is suspended while the donation machinery was clearly active is… not a great sign
is it normal for these places to have 0 liabilities? That alone seems like it ought to raise a flag - if you're not spending the money...
Edit: Clicked through some of the other entries in there and yeah, usually liabilities are relatively close to incomes. How the system didn't catch this is beyond me.
>Namecheap
Namecheap and scammers -- I dare you to name a more iconic duo.
> Chance Letikva is registered with the US IRS as a charity
At what point do audit requirements kick in for charities?
The article names Erez Hadari as someone involved with the organization.
Sometimes just a little bit DNS research can yield a lot of useful results.
Looking at the passive DNS records for the domain chanceletikva.org shows it references the email address davidm@yeahdim.co.il.That email address is tied to multiple website registrations for a person by the name of David Margaliot, and also Shoshana Margaliot.
A search on this name in Domaintools finds the name David Margaliot tied to at least 25 domains, including ezri.org.il, which is a very odd site that features a huge image of a young child who is apparently in the hospital holding a gift wrapped box with a teddy bear. The site asks for donations but has a strange mission statement: Ezri Association promotes life-saving innovation through a surveillance drone project for emergency response teams, the establishment of an international medical knowledge database, along with other technological initiatives".
I'll probably continue the rest of this in a follow-up story.
The root cause of the problem is that parents and children need to raise funds for cancer treatment in the first place.
The fact that families have to crowdfund lifesaving care creates the vulnerability but it doesn't force anyone to build an industrialized scam on top of it
Orphan crushing machine operator: "If I don't do it, someone else will"
Orphan crushing proponent: "Why should I pay for orphans not to be crushed??"
There's money to be made on arbitration of orphan crushing! If I don't do it someone else will.
Introducing “The Automatic Orphan Crusher 9000” complete with conveyor belt fed chutes and titanium jaws, no orphan can escape! Just place a piece of candy…”
Does it have AI?
That would be part of our Orphan Industries plan for managing output of your 9000s on the industrial floor. Sure. Monitor throughput and TTK right there from the app.
there is no trolley
This framing is disingenuous. We're meant to say "tear down the orphan-crushing machine!" But in this case there's no machine, only human mortality. You're substituting a simple question ("why are we crushing orphans?") for a complex one ("who should pay for poor children's healthcare?")
Also, the scale seems much larger than $20k.
> doesn't force anyone to build an industrialized scam on top of it
The incentives are there. Our economy runs on incentives. Create a vulnerable group and the sharks smell blood in the water.
Incentives don’t remove agency. They might have incentives… but these are awful scum who deserve nothing but contempt
No but it provides a framework to begin thinking about ways we can protect the vulnerable from these contemptible but totally predictable bad actors.
For example, families forced to publicly beg for money to provide their sick children with treatment. What societal structures enable this situation to occur? Who is profiting off of this structure?
You'd have to be inconscionably crass to profiteer off charities treating kids for cancer ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_J._Trump_Foundation "Granting money to charities that rented Trump Organization facilities".
Well, that's a pretty bold stance. Scammers who steal from dying children are bad people? Geez...
No-one is hoarding a free and easy supply of treatments. They're all hard-won advancements. The vulnerability is there by default.
Whether taxes, health insurance, the Church, or gofundme, technically all life saving care is mostly crowd-funded. Maybe not in some Wild West dystopia, but generally the pooling of funds seems to work better than solo funding.
Involuntary, progressive crowdfunding through government threat of violence (taxes) seems to work better than the other methods and most consider it humane. Americans have shown little interest historically in doing the humane thing, unfortunately.
Taxes: the price one must pay for civilization.
>but it doesn't force anyone to build an industrialized scam on top of it
I mean almost the entirety of the US healthcare system is a industrialized scam engineered by middlemen
There's a benefit to having a service tied to the individual receiving the service. For starters it put price pressure and competition on providing the service. When someone else is paying for something you don't have a signal of efficacy, in terms of pricing or quality.
To put another way, if I were facing some terminal illness I would want to have full control of picking the service even if it costs money. Sure, I would want "the best" specific to me and have someone else pick up the tab, but that's a fantasy, because no system or third party has as much skin in the game as me. That's why things like elective surgery are so cheap and competitive.
The problem is why do these treatments cost so much? What prevents competition and innovation. And my argument it's largely due to regulation and third party payer system
You’re confusing ideology with the way the world actually operates.
The general public doesn’t have enough information to make informed decisions when it comes to healthcare. This alone completely removes the usual market forces from providing any benefit when it comes to healthcare.
Cancer treatments don’t inherently cost that much money, the systems to ensure people are actually getting useful treatments are expensive. You can’t trust companies selling cures. You can’t trust every doctor when they have financial incentives to offer treatments. Insurance companies are in an adversarial relationship with providing treatments, which doesn’t result in efficient supervision here. Lawsuits offer some protection, but at extreme cost to everyone involved. Etc etc.
The net result of all these poor incentives is single payer systems end up being way more efficient, resulting in people living longer and spending less on healthcare.
> The general public doesn’t have enough information to make informed decisions when it comes to healthcare. This alone completely removes the usual market forces from providing any benefit when it comes to healthcare.
Why is it always "the general public" and not "I". Do you have enough information about decisions? Can I take away some of your rights? No, of course not. Everyone else is dumb except me.
I'm sorry but I refuse to believe some unelected, anonymous bureaucrat has my best interests in mind or can even know me anything about me such that I want to allow them to make health decisions for me.
The whole "anonymous bureaucrat" shtick doesn't land anymore. The purpose of having long-term non-political staff is so that operations don't change on a whim when some rogue director comes in and wants a second Ferrari. The reason government spends more AND is paradoxically more efficient is because most of the work of those bureaucrats is tracking, reporting, and reconciliation. That's the whole deal. Congress passes laws and in those laws is usually an obscene and near impossible amount of auditing.
I trust government staff far more than the decision of unregulated, greedy corporations who literally exist to extract the most money from whatever process they're trying to sell you.
Can you name someone that is a long-term non-political person that is making these decisions?
I have trouble believing empowering people who have no risk of losing their job and no one knows they exist is the best model for making decisions for other people.
The entirety of Medicaid and Medicare.
EDIT: Also the whole VA system.
Who runs Medicaid, Medicare or VA? Name the person. Who is held responsible? These are just words at this point and its an ideological battle. You have no idea.
>I have trouble believing empowering people who have no risk of losing their job and no one knows they exist is the best model for making decisions for other people.
You mean like the (non-medical doctors) third-parties contracted by my private insurance provider who routinely deny important care[0] and even reject pre-approvals for antibiotics for MRSA infections even after multiple interactions with several medical doctors confirming both the diagnosis (with accompanying pathology) and the appropriate course of treatment.
Yeah, you keep that rolled up newspaper handy so you can "Gub'mint bad! Bad Gub'mint!"
I hope you never have to deal with a life-threatening situation where your insurer flatly refuses to cover treatment until after you're dead or have body parts amputated.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46291740
> greedy corporations who literally exist to extract the most money
Every single product and service I am using in my life is made by a corporation. The clothes I wear, the food I eat, the car I drive, the PC I am making my living on.
Government?! Decaying infrastructure, lines at the DMV, crappy schools and killer hospitals.
You may trust the government if you want, but I will never. However, you are the only one pushing your choice onto me and reducing my options. I am fine with you using private or governmental services but you won't allow me this freedom of choice.
> Do you have enough information about decisions?
Me personally, No.
I don’t have enough information to make informed decisions here and you don’t either. Off the top of your head, how well educated is your dentist? You after all made an informed decision picking them. So how well did their background compare to others in your area. What where your concerns about their dental programs weaknesses and how was that offset by… Except no let me guess that never entered your mind did it.
> Off the top of your head, how well educated is your dentist?
My dentist cleans my teeth. If it's painful every time I come or I keep getting cavities I consider changing dentists. If they suggest I replace my teeth with veneers or something extreme, I consider someone else. And I'll do a few google searches.
It seems pretty normal. You don't do this?
So you didn’t look into their overall competence just the superficial aspects that occur to everyone. I agree that’s normal, but it’s also the underlying problem I was pointing to.
So you don’t need to continue, you just proved my point.
> I'm sorry but I refuse to believe some unelected, anonymous bureaucrat has my best interests in mind or can even know me anything about me such that I want to allow them to make health decisions for me.
I'm sorry to tell you that this is, but unelected bureaucrats are constantly making health decisions on your behalf. You may not want government bureaucrats, but bureaucrats already work in your employer's HR department, deciding on which insurer to partner with, and with what benefits. They are at your insurance company, doctors office, and hospital administration, negotiating and deciding which procedures and drugs are available to you without ever asking for your opinion. Bureaucrats you didn't vote for infest drug company's research and finance offices, determining the availability and cost of your present and future care. None of these even pretend to act in your interests.
I'd rather have some government bureaucrat preside over all the other predatory bureaucrats. I sure as hell wouldn't be make well-informed decisions in the ER, or after getting a cancer diagnosis. Further, it is impossible to compare provider quality and final costs for elective, cosmetic procedures when I'm under no time pressure or stress.
Sure, in that regard bureaucrats make sure my grocer has full shelves. There are likely dozens if not hundreds of people responsible for my local grocer just to make sure I have food.
I have no problem with bureaucrats. I want a choice. If I come in one day to find the shelves empty, I go somewhere else. If they make it difficult for me to check out, or are too expensive, I change. I just want choice.
You can choose to listen to the same unelected anonymous bureaucrats. Just log on to FDA or whatever, and follow their advice (e.g. follow the food pyramid). Only one of us wants to remove choice from the other, and that's the difference.
Time and time again large competing forces in the market are found to have colluded instead of directly competing with each other to drive price/cost down. What is it that still makes you believe that two (or n-number) of providers won't collude to charge an astronomical amount for a life-saving treatment?
Because if something sucks, someone comes up with something better and sells it for a profit. This is the history of pretty much every other good or service that is not heavily influenced by regulation and artificial barriers to entry
> Because if something sucks, someone comes up with something better and sells it for a profit.
This is basically a religious belief at this point. It's how a perfectly ideal free market might work, but we don't have any of these, especially in healthcare.
Do you not use private businesses or something? Do you not shop at a private grocer or order things from Amazon or use a private search engine?
Probably 99% of what I consume comes from private companies and the services generally get better over time, with some exceptions. Compare that to an experience with the TSA.
> Time and time again large competing forces in the market are found to have colluded instead of directly competing with each other to drive price/cost down.
Collusion and cartels never work on the long run. It's an unstable equilibrium, the incentive to reduce prices to capture more market is too great.
> What is it that still makes you believe
Competition. It's the only force keeping humans honest. That's why we must treat any barriers of entry in a market with extreme care. The only "failed" or "captured" market is a strongly regulated one.
Markets can remain irrational, or colluding, far longer than you can stay solvent (or even alive).
For example, while the Phoebus cartel only really lasted from 1925 through to 1939, 1000hr incandescent light bulbs remain the standard offering till present day. Profitable market manipulations are sticky.
The whole notion that markets are efficient is just a mathematical construct that has become very dogmatic for people. But if you look into the details, markets are efficient under the assumptions of perfect information and infinite time. Neither of those conditions are present in the real world: we neither have perfect information nor infinite time.
> the Phoebus cartel
> 1000hr incandescent light bulbs remain the standard offering till present day
This proves in fact that all the cartel did was establish a standard, an optimal average between various tradeoffs when building an incandescent lightbulb: brightness, cost, efficiency and life span. Yes, the cartel behaved anti-competitively. The effect on the market? Nil.
> perfect information and infinite time
There is absolutely no requirement for this for markets to work. Markets work just fine with partial information and just-in time. When new information and new market participants appear, markets will self-correct. The only way to prevent markets from working is through government intervention.
In facts, free markets are the only system we have that works with incomplete info and reacts in real-time. Central planning will happily decide on incomplete info then never adapt. We saw that during communism when the Party decided allocate X resources for production of Y and it always resulted in a glut or shortages. Central planning doesn't work.
> Competition. It's the only force keeping humans honest.
Pure misanthropic fantasy pretending to be sophisticated economics.
> misanthropic fantasy
It's the obvious reality around me here in Eastern Europe. We were starving under communism before 1990 but are now enjoying the amazing wealth capitalism brought.
> Collusion and cartels never work on the long run.
Define "long run" - they have been already proven to have worked for years and in some cases even decades.
> it put price pressure and competition on providing the service
This is simply not true. Healthcare in the US is comparatively much more expensive than countries offering subsidized healthcare with comparable or better outcomes(1).
> it's largely due to regulation and third party payer system
Capitalism can't work in a market that's completely consolidated, and where people can't offer to not buy your service. Healthcare in publicly subsidized countries is much less expensive because it's regulated. Compare the price of simple drugs like insulin or asthma medicine if you need an easy example. Pharma companies still happily sell there, which is to say that the difference is pure profit on the back of sick people who don't have a choice.
My biggest grief against this individual payment system is moral though. I don't see the virtue in a system where kids have to put on a show to receive care. Or anyone for that matter, you'll give to a kid because they're cute and generate empathy, does it make someone ugly with no family less deserving of getting cured from cancer?
1: https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/health-...
Because when you're dying you have no bargaining position. You can't just wait it out. And you're just a single client, whether you personally die or not does not meaningfully change their bottom line.
So it is a highly asymmetric bargaining situation where all the incentives are poorly aligned. Of course it is exploitative.
Okay, you have no bargaining decision when you have N providers, so we should get rid of all providers with a single provider because only then you'll be in better bargaining position.
And now your death will have a meaningful change to the career bureaucrat or politician that made the decision that led to your death.
Because power of an individual vote is much more powerful than the power to take your business elsewhere. That's if you can find out the responsible party that makes these decisions and they're not appointed but elected, otherwise you'd have to mount an influence campaign on the politicians with 90% re-election rate to change said bureaucratic leader.
Makes a lot of sense.
All empirical evidence shows that single payer systems work better, producing far better outcomes at lower cost, than the US system. In fact, so much better that a single payer system is what Congress has chosen for itself!
But seems some prefer to believe a theoretical argument with no evidence to back it up.
“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
> All empirical evidence shows that single payer systems work better, producing far better outcomes at lower cost, than the US system.
Agreed. Also, all empirical evidence shows that free-markets work better, producing far better outcomes at lower cost than either. Just look around at any less-regulated and thus free-er markets. Or just "reject the evidence" - your choice.
> die
I am middle-aged so I used plenty of health services in my life. I always had choices when in came to price and level of care and treatment. None of them were for the "dying" case. But I do have an insurance specifically for that case. I am a rational being so I plan in advance. No need for a government bureaucrat to decide my health care for me just in case some day I may be incapacitated.
When you have to choose a provider or you die, there won’t be a real downward pressure on price because there is no need to form a cartel to feed on this. You can see this in every single market of utility or de facto utility segments.
It's likely caused by the very same thing that causes human beings to knowingly and willingly steal money from children that need that money to live.
Some people seem to exist in a bubble where they believe that nothing bad will ever happen to them or their loved ones, so paying to improve society has no benefit to themselves.
Even if you never personally needed health insurance (which is unrealistic), you’d still benefit from a better, safer, less cut throat society.
Same with education. I am more than happy to pay taxes for an education system, even if I do not personally have children.
There are both private and public health care systems. Private care is a complicated scam, the small print is tens of times the contract.
Public health systems vary with country. Private advocates say public sucks, until it is their turn to be scammed.
What's 'paid' to the median child in education is a pittance compared to what the payers suck back out of them in old age during social security.
Public education is largely a scam to put 'original sin' of debt of children to society so when they grow up there is some plausible explanation that "we're a society" and they must feed into the pyramid scheme.
> What's 'paid' to the median child in education is a pittance compared to what the payers suck back out of them in old age during social security.
I'm not sure what nation you're from, but here, in the US, we pay a fairly significant part of our wages towards something called "Social Security."
If we pay a lot, during our working time, we can draw more, after retirement (and it is nowhere near a living wage -it was never meant to be).
In my country, we pay for education with property taxes.
I hear you on intergenerational stuff. I just don’t think “public education is a scam” fits what most kids actually receive.
Kids are not only getting classroom time. They inherit a whole baseline that previous taxpayers built: safer streets, clean water, courts that mostly function, vaccines, roads, libraries, stable money, and the accumulated tech and culture that makes modern jobs even possible. That bundle is huge, and it starts paying out long before anyone is old enough to “owe” anything.
Also, adults are not literally trapped. People can move, downshift, opt out of a lot, or choose different communities. Most don’t, even when they complain loudly, and to me that’s a pretty strong signal the deal is at least somewhat reasonable. Not perfect. Not fair for everyone. But not a cartoon pyramid scheme either.
If there’s a real fight worth having, it’s making the burdens and benefits less lopsided across generations, not pretending the whole social investment in kids is fake.
But charitable causes perpetuate the problems by creating an industry around them rather than trying to find solutions for them. You can’t trust industry to solve civil problems like healthcare or housing, since they shouldn’t be problems in the first place. Its like trying to trust the free market to keep people from raping and killing each other—people will rape and kill with or without the market! Some level of coercion is necessary that free market principles cannot employ.
This isn’t about free market vs single payer healthcare. These kids are from poor countries. Unless you’re arguing for rich countries to offer literal worldwide healthcare.
You mean what's happening right now in US healthcare?
The fact that ACA is an insurance scam as opposed to healthcare reveals who is in control.
> It's likely caused by the very same thing that causes human beings to
We’re not billiard balls. We have agency. Nothing causes a human being to choose to commit immoral acts vs. immoral acts. A human being may be put in a situation that may entice that person’s corrupt desires (we used to call this temptation), and responsibility while mitigating culpability is possible when someone’s rational faculties are overwhelmed, but the choice remains.
Blaming systems for theft is scapegoating and an evasion of responsibility. (To make this clearer by distinction: a starving man taking bread from an overstocked warehouse during a famine is not choosing to commit an immoral act; he isn’t stealing in the first place, as some share of that bread is his).
This really doesn't explain why particular places and times in history have much higher crime levels. If what you said was true then rule of law would have been the standard throughout history... it has not been.
Thought experiment:
Let’s say I have a bag of bread, and I pass them down one by one expecting people to only keep one. You decide to keep two.
The human’s reasoning is often bulletproof:
I don’t have enough. You do. I’d didn’t steal from the person next to me, I took it from someone with plenty
^ No where in that reasoning is the possibility that in the aggregate, if enough people do that, you steal from each other.
—-
Insecurity needs to be rehabilitated before any form of support can be provided. Otherwise you get toxic results. How could charity possible go wrong? Easy - bad hearts are left untreated.
“
Today a hope of many years' standing is in large part fulfilled. The civilization of the past hundred years, with its startling industrial changes, has tended more and more to make life insecure. Young people have come to wonder what would be their lot when they came to old age. The man with a job has wondered how long the job would last.
This social security measure gives at least some protection to thirty millions of our citizens who will reap direct benefits through unemployment compensation, through old-age pensions and through increased services for the protection of children and the prevention of ill health.
We can never insure one hundred percent of the population against one hundred percent of the hazards and vicissitudes of life, but we have tried to frame a law which will give some measure of protection to the average citizen and to his family against the loss of a job and against poverty-ridden old age.
This law, too, represents a cornerstone in a structure which is being built but is by no means complete. It is a structure intended to lessen the force of possible future depressions. It will act as a protection to future Administrations against the necessity of going deeply into debt to furnish relief to the needy. The law will flatten out the peaks and valleys of deflation and of inflation. It is, in short, a law that will take care of human needs and at the same time provide for the United States an economic structure of vastly greater soundness.
I congratulate all of you ladies and gentlemen, all of you in the Congress, in the executive departments and all of you who come from private life, and I thank you for your splendid efforts in behalf of this sound, needed and patriotic legislation.
If the Senate and the House of Representatives in this long and arduous session had done nothing more than pass this Bill, the session would be regarded as historic for all time. ”
--Franklin D. Roosevelt
I wish this was still what we meant by "Greatness" in America
Trickle-down bread!
I think it's more complicated than this. People with incurable diseases are desperate and sometimes resort to unproven, dangerous and very expensive treatments. Unfortunately, most people don't have enough money for that, so in order to afford them they try to obtain donations to pursue the treatment they think will save them. Places like Turkey, China, etc are heavens for this kind of medicine.
I think you meant to say "havens". Or, I hope you did.
The replies to this comment make me so depressed.
easier said than done.
Parents had enough problems to think about.
In a similar way we can say that every shop in Amazon can create own digital shop themselves, but marketing, sales channels and distribution is not easy to acquire.
Politely, no. The root cause is 100% this a-hole scammer and his accomplices.
thieving and scamming are not caused by the existence of scarcity
Is there even standard practices to audit the effectiveness of charity? No accountability means they will always operate like a black box, and I’ve always thought black boxes create misalignments.
Money goes in, and good feelings come out. It certainly serves a purpose, but not the intended one.
Yes, it's called Form 990 and it is a requirement to publish it on a yearly basis to retain non-profit status. You can search for any US-registered NGO here for example: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/
To put it in HN terms, this is what people here like to use to shit on Mozilla for how much they pay their executives while having zero insight into how much Firefox's for-profit competitors pay their executives.
> To put it in HN terms, this is what people here like to use to shit on Mozilla for how much they pay their executives while having zero insight into how much Firefox's for-profit competitors pay their executives.
It's dubious to say Google "competes" with Mozilla, because they pay Mozilla to develop Firefox to avoid antitrust issues, but it's easy enough to find CEO compensation for public companies.
https://www.sec.gov/answers/execcomp.htm
Of course people have published the numbers for well known companies:
https://www.jagranjosh.com/general-knowledge/highest-paid-ce...
Also, "Other companies pay their CEOs ridiculous amounts, so we're going to," is a poor justification, and just shows Mozilla execs are there to enrich themselves, and don't really care about the browser or community. But I guess they can't spend all of the money on Pocket and AI.
Hmmm. But who can audit the reporting? Evidently, this looks like something they can manipulate.
Is the bottom line roughly:
Money received: 1000
Money used for good: 800
Labor: 200
Is that it?
Because I can assure you, that will not turn out well.
The IRS can audit the reporting, and if you lie on egregiously you can even go to jail. Granted that is very rare, and we currently have an anti-IRS administration, but that’s the basic enforcement mechanism.
Ok, so what your describing is a pinky promise. I'm guessing enforcement requires people which is magically _too expensive_ and therefore worthless.
> But who can audit the reporting?
The same people that audit your taxes, roughly with the same consequences for lying. Except the IRS is far more likely to send unannounced auditors to NGOs than they are to send them to for-profit companies or individuals. It's more of a hassle to get/retain tax-free status than it is to simply pay your taxes like everyone else (as it should be).
> Is that it?
Let me guess: you haven't clicked on "view filing", which leads to a roughly 20-pages-long document.
Caught me :)
Do any real* societies have health care systems where everyone who needs cancer treatment gets the best available?
* by real, I mean large societies that aren't propped up by some bizarre economic quirk...eg maybe the sultan of brunei can personally pay for everyone bruneian citizen to get the best cancer treatment. But that's not a scalable solution
Right, how much are crowdfunding platforms and payment processors making off of the desperation of people who can't afford medical treatment?
While that is indeed one of the causes, it does feel a bit like whataboutism to point it out on an article explaining the scam.
So capitalism?
Whether or not non-productive individuals who don't do any work can own the means of production and reap the majority of the economic surplus from it is somewhat tangential to the question of who pays for whose healthcare.
There are plenty of capitalist nations that provide public healthcare on a large spectrum of coverage and quality.
With 2 month long plus waits for basic scans in countries like Canada
In terms of waiting times to see a doctor or specialist (the only cases where stats for the US seem to be available), the US looks a touch better than average in waiting times for healthcare within comparable countries: https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/health-at-a-glance-2025....
Ahead of Canada, sure (they come worst here in both scenarios) but behind countries like the UK, Germany & the Netherlands that do have universal health care.
I prefer that over people having to start a GoFundme whenever they get sick. My relatives in Germany get necessary treatment as needed. There is the myth of no wait times in the US but from my experience there are also of wait times here.
Still better than months long fundraisers that aren't even certain to raise enough to cover the cost.
The boy with cancer who is a main subject of the article and was scammed out of desperation to raise funds to cover his healthcare is in The Philippines.
"Aljin says treatment at their local hospital in the city of Cebu was slow, and she had messaged everyone she could think of for help."
The Philippines' constitution says access to healthcare is a human right. They have universal healthcare insurance, and public hospitals and medical centers.
The next one is the girl from Colombia. Colombia has a mostly public (with regulated private) healthcare system with universal health insurance.
The next one is from Ukraine. Ukraine has a government run universal healthcare system. Wikipedia tells me "Ukrainian healthcare should be free to citizens according to law," fantastic, but then it goes on, "but in practice patients contribute to the cost of most aspects of healthcare."
In first world countries with social healthcare systems like Canada and Germany and Australia, people with complex illnesses do not get coverage for unlimited treatments either, or general costs of being sick (travel, family carers, etc). There are many cases of fundraisers for, and charities which try to help, sick people in need in these countries.
Capitalism is not the reason not everyone with cancer is being cured and not chasing expensive treatments. Healthcare is something that you can throw unlimited money into. You'll get diminishing returns, but there will always be more machines and scans and tests and drugs and surgical teams and devices you can pay for. It doesn't matter the economic system, at some point more people will get more good from spending money on other things, and those unfortunate and desperate ones who fall through the cracks might have to resort to raising money themselves.
If you think there aren't long waits for non-emergency treatment in the US, you are lucky or a moron.
I needed a sleep study. An inpatient sleep study is booked 3 years out here. Good insurance.
Seeing that sleep study doctor in the first place just to get sent a $150 gadget that listens to me sleep? I waited two months. The follow up appointment? 3 months.
Do you know why non-emergency care waits that long? Efficiency. Turns out, hospitals want to not spend extra money on doctors they don't need whether they get paid by the government or this weird industry called "insurance" we have developed.
Go head, tell me about how you can get any treatment or any scan in a week without fail in our wonderful overpriced system.
In the US, twenty day wait list for a broken toe, seven month wait list for a neurologist, five month wait list for a deviated septum surgery, and good luck finding a PCP taking new patients.
This quality of service costs me and my wife ~$23,000/year.
Sure, we can walk into urgent care and get seen. I've also never had a problem walking into a walk-in clinic in Canada, either. The clinic's lobby and the doctor's car in the parking lot isn't as nice over there, though.
Any system needs a resource allocation algorithm.
In capitalism it is easy and transparent: price, with the side effect of aligning society interests with those of the selfish individual.
Of course the strange and heavily regulated US health-care system is obviously far far away from a free market.
In socialism it's much more random: black markets, lists, lotteries, friends and network of connections. The side effect is that the most productive individuals are discouraged and punished, with the whole society lagging in effect.
Case in point: the EU that started lagging the USA so much in growth that ended up having to beg for basic defense when a blood-thirsty neighbor came hungry for land.
When I'm unconscious in an ambulance, I'm definitely in a position to appreciate all that price transparency the free market has provided, so I can rationally weigh up all my options calmly and objectively while my organs are shutting down.
The great majority of health care is not emergency health care. Actually, the fact that emergency health is so expensive is quite the incentive for preventive medicine. And for the rest, insurance is necessary. Like for house fires or floods: I get the insurance but I also check my wires and pipes regularly.
Calling the american healthcare system easy and transparent is insane.
Can't think of a socialist country, but invite you to visit the German system. Significantly less costly for society and objectively better for the people falling ill (or just having a baby born).
And no, no lists, no lotteries or any of that other lies the conservative US media is spewing out to keep the masses pacified.
I strongly believe, that if US citizens were to experience German healthcare for a year and having to go back to the US system, that there would be riots. Because I don’t think anyone with first hand experience of both systems would ever want to return to the US system.
Yep, loving my gesetzliche Krankenkasse (public health insurance, which is more like "highly regulated insurance"), even more than I liked the Privatkrankenversicherung (less highly regulated, but still with better guardrails than a lot of things I've seen in the States) I was on my first decade in the system here. Sure, there are some specialists who won't accept it, or who will give you a sooner appointment if you're private pay, but in that situation, you have the option of declaring that you're a self-payer that quarter, and your public insurance will reimburse in the amount they normally would have for that procedure or exam. For things like an MRI, the full retail cost in Germany is still much lower than in the US (it was about 600 EUR for my back a few years ago, while I was still privately insured, and I still had to wait for reimbursment).
Even once I do hit the income threshold to switch back to private (switching back to fulltime work), I'm pretty sure I won't.
As far as doctor choice goes, I feel like I have more on the public insurance here (like 90% of the population) than I did with UHC in the early 2000's back in the US. I certainly have fewer financial surprises.
No lists? Have you ever actually lived in Germany and had to interact with its’ healthcare system?
Healthcare in the US seems to cost about double per capita what it does in other developed countries with universial/social healthcare. Public spending in US is on-par with others, and then private spending is that much again. Standard of healthcare I've heard (and would hope) is world class if you can pay, but still something seems broken there to be sure.
But you have lists, queues, lotteries, whatever you call it. That's not a lie. The fact you think lists are a vast right wing conspiracy demonstrates your government is not really forthcoming about your healthcare system. There are lists everywhere. There are ambulance wait times, hospital emergency wait times, various levels of urgent and elective treatment wait times. There are procedures and medicines and tests that are simply not covered at all.
Now, obviously USA has queues and lists too. And I could be wrong but I'm sure I've heard that US private insurance companies are notorious for not covering certain treatments and drugs as well. I don't know what it is exactly these right wing people are saying about healthcare, I thought they did not like the American "Obamacare" though.
>And no, no lists
There definitely are lists. You don't just get the surgery or therapy you need the next day. You get the next free slot in the list of people queuing at the hospital/practice that still has free slots.
For example the first appointment you can get at my state funded therapist if you call today, will be in june. How is that "not a list"?
Or like, if you call most public GPs in my neighbourhood, they'll all tell you they're full and don't have slots to take on any new patients and you should "try somewhere else". How is that "not a list"?
There are multiple lists here in the NL. I called for a surgery and got put on the fast list (she said that if it weren’t urgent, it would be over a year wait). Your doc has a lot of influence on how urgent things are and how far you are willing to travel. I got in to see a therapist in a matter of weeks, because I was willing to travel out of the city; otherwise it will be months. The doc can see the lines and give you recommendations; all you have to do is ask to be seen sooner.
Doesn't work like that in Austria. Or my doctor's were unwilling to fake urgency to bypass the waiting system for me.
Anyway, do you not realize the fault with the system in your logic? Because if everything becomes urgent in order to bypass queues, then nothing is urgent anymore.
It doesn't fix the problem, you're just scamming the system to get ahead of the problem.
In my case, there was no faking urgency. I was pointing out that urgency puts you in a different line that gets priority (basically, cancellations from the longer line).
For some other things, you can travel further away to where there is less demand for what you need, and if you're willing, you don't have to wait as long. These are all different "lines" and they're the ones doing the schedule.
Ok but urgency is a different kettle of fish. Life threatening cases get urgency everywhere and immediate care everywhere.
Let's focus on the other part you said, "waiting 1 year" if it's not urgent. 1 year sucks no matter how you spin it around.
I wish I could have waited one year. 0/10, would not recommend that proceedure. FWIW, it's a very common, usually also scheduled long in advance (even in the US). Pretty much every man has to get one over 40; so it makes sense the wait list is long unless you've got something else going on.
>Ok but urgency is a different kettle of fish. Life threatening cases get urgency everywhere and immediate care everywhere.
Except it doesn't. At least not in the United States. I have Peripheral Artery Disease.
I had two completely occluded arteries in my left leg and a third that was mostly occluded and had an aneurysm to boot.
One day, that third artery collapsed and I was left with zero blood flow to my left foot.
The doctor had me go to the Emergency Room to get testing and imaging to have surgery the following week.
He did not simply schedule surgery, as that would have required pre-approval from my insurance company and, in fact, the insurance company denied the claim and did not approve the procedure (which saved my foot) until six weeks later -- at which time I'd have had to have my foot amputated without the angioplasty and arterial bypass.
In fact, after surgery the insurance company continued to deny my claims and refused to authorize pain meds (they sliced my left leg open from my hip to my ankle and rooted around to use an existing vein to bypass the blockage on one of my arteries) for those same six weeks.
Oh yeah, US healthcare is so much better. /rolls eyes. My insurer would have forced me to wait until I required amputation if I hadn't just gone ahead on an emergency basis as suggested (because it's not unusual for that to happen) by the surgeon.
And in case you were wondering, yes I have private insurance and pay nearly $1200/month just for me. In fact, my deductible for next year just went up 20% and my annual out of pocket doubled, yet I'm still paying essentially the same premium.
No. The US healthcare system is completely fucked and I hope you don't die or lose important body parts learning that.
I don’t think the parent implied lying about urgency.
How else do you interpret his statement: "Your doc has a lot of influence on how urgent things are"
If it's not lying then it's another word that ultimately still does the same outcome of putting you ahead of the rest.
They do? If they misdiagnose something, you can end up in the slow line instead of the fast one, or vice versa. Compared to them, you have no influence.
That's the difference between a corrupt and non-corrupt system rather than a capitalist vs socialist one. Nearly all European countries have an at least somewhat socialist healthcare system but in most you don't have to resort to those tactics.
Humans have tendency to become corrupt
the market / capitalism won’t correct itself, much people want to call it God/ perfect
Regulation, anti-trust laws try to correct somethings but many politicians are against those things because they limit the profit that can be made, profit first, that’s the corruption
Theory:
> In socialism it's much more random: black markets, lists, lotteries, friends and network of connections. The side effect is that the most productive individuals are discouraged and punished, with the whole society lagging in effect.
Evidence: the vast majority of European countries who have socialized medicine and seem to be doing fine.
> the vast majority of European countries who have socialized medicine and seem to be doing fine
You do realize that the "vast majority" of European countries doesn't mean highly developed Western Europe, right?
Here in Central and Eastern Europe (where I live) socialized medicine is not "fine". You should visit some hospitals in Bulgaria or Romanian to get a more complete picture. We pay the state outrageous insurance costs every month then go and pay out-of-pocket in private hospitals when we actually need them.
>>In socialism it's much more random: black markets, lists, lotteries
>Evidence: the vast majority of European countries who have socialized medicine and seem to be doing fine.
That evidence of socialism working well, only works as long as there are enough resources to cover the needs of most people, basically some of the wealthier European countries.
But when those resources become scarce due to poor economic conditions and/or mismanagement, then you'll see the endless queues, black margets and nepotism running the system.
Evidence: former European communist countries who experienced both systems and where in some, nepotism to bypass lists still work to this day.
I think the 2024 Economics Nobel disproves this. It showed that nations with strong institutions create wealth - and it was a causative link they proved, not simply correlation.
How does that disprove what I said about abundance or lack thereof in socialized systems? Feels like an orthogonal issue.
Socialized systems don't work without abundance. How you generate that abundance is orthogonal to socialism since even countries that are wealthy on paper suffer from shortages and long waiting times in public healthcare leading to a gray-market of using connections to get ahead or more private use.
They are arguing that nepotism caused the lack of abundance, instead of the lack of abundance causing the nepotism as you are arguing.
Both are true. Because when the abundance runs out, people start using nepotism to get what they need. You can see it in the tech job market now. More and more good jobs are only through networking. Meritocracy alone was enough during the times of abundance.
Hmm. In the framing you are using, I would say that wealth is first generated from strong institutions - socialism or not.
Rather, crony capitalism with no real competition (cartelisation in the absence of strong regulation). This invariably leads to Imperialism ... We see this with BiGTech today and the phenomena of "digital imperialism".
Capitalism is the reason those treatments exist in the first place. I don't see many cutting-edge cancer treatments coming out of Cuba, North Korea or Venezuela.
Those cutting edge cancer treatments come usually out of universities from publicly funded research.
But don't worry your free market friends are killing it right now, for tax reductions
https://www.wired.com/story/how-trump-killed-cancer-research...
Market economy. Capitalism is a name for the bad thing-- "the accumulation of capital by some to the exclusion of others". Those who argue for a market economy usually claim that with their rule, it won't be accumulation of capital by some to the exclusion of others, with them assuring us that there will be free markets and competition.
Both actual capitalism, i.e. the bad thing, and this which can plausible be argued to be well-functioning market economies, are is often stabilized by adding elements of communism to the system-- publicly funded education, healthcare etc. This is one of the reasons why I as a vaguely socialism-influenced whatever I can reasonably be said to be see communism, i.e. a system characterized by the distribution principle "to each according to his need" as less revolutionary than the socialism distribution principle "to each according to his contribution". Communist distribution principles can coexist with ill-functioning market systems such as things which have degenerated into actual capitalism, whereas the socialist distribution principle can't.
Even in a pure unadulterated market economy that doesn't publicly fund healthcare you would expect to be able to protect yourself from high-impact low-likelihood events by means of an insurance. I find it hard to describe the US healthcare situation as anything other than a market failure
> I find it hard to describe the US healthcare situation as anything other than a market failure
The market is just reacting to the regulatory environment and all the political patches and shortcuts of same done to appease voters over the last 100 years. Fix that and the market will sort itself out.
Basically the US has mixed the worst aspects of for profit healthcare with the worst aspects of socialized healthcare. It underperforms while still costing obscene amounts of money.
I was shooting heroin and reading “The Fountainhead” in the front seat of my privately owned police cruiser when a call came in. I put a quarter in the radio to activate it. It was the chief.
“Bad news, detective. We got a situation.”
“What? Is the mayor trying to ban trans fats again?”
“Worse. Somebody just stole four hundred and forty-seven million dollars’ worth of bitcoins.”
The heroin needle practically fell out of my arm.
Probably, but that isn't really something I say anything about in what I wrote. Instead, what I wrote is basically a terminology quibble with the use capitalism instead of market economy.
I don't think your statement is true absolutely, I think it's very possible to have pure market economies that are quite well-functioning, i.e. not monopolies etc., where many people are very rich but with some people being really poor, even to the point of not being able to afford healthcare or healthcare insurance, so I don't think it's guaranteed to be true, though I think it's mostly true.
> Communist distribution principles can coexist with ill-functioning market systems such as things which have degenerated into actual capitalism, whereas the socialist distribution principle can't.
You won't have to worry about distributing advanced cancer medications when they don't exist in the Communist version, because they weren't discovered. You can't fulfil a need with a drug you never risked a giant amount of funding and effort to discover.
I’m the farthest thing from a communist, but what makes you think public funding cannot be given to drug research?
It can be, but who decides what to work on? Capitalism puts risk and reward off to the side, to be done by experts. Why take the risk if you have no reward, and, conversely, why give someone a load of money to allocate if there's no risk for them if it fails?
the problem is your framing of the problem, not the questions you posed. it seems to me like you’re assuming that the only metrics for risk and reward are profit and cost. let me put it this way: do you find there to be any intrinsic value to the invention of antibiotics, or is such a development only worth the money that it can make for its inventor / discoverer? do you think that the cost of developing such technologies is worth it even if it does not gain any material income?
Let’s also imagine the other side of the equation. Can you not imagine any penalty or cost other than bankruptcy? Let’s say you are forced to allocate $1 million per year to research. is the only cost function you can imagine based on the risk of default?
I would say your problem is the framing :) You're assuming an outcome because you know antibiotics work. What is the incentive to spend $10m on research for a particular drug? It's not "because we know it ends up in a cure for X", because we haven't done the research yet. It's "because we think this will reach enough people to be useful and we'll commit a lot to this thing vs lots of other options."
You literally have the communist distribution principle for education at the primary level in the US, and it's a stabilizing element that allows you to stabilize your system despite having one of the harshest market economies in the world.
So I don't understand how your comment really relates to mine. My comment is basically me quibbling about terminology with the terms capitalism and market economy.
"the accumulation of capital by some to the exclusion of others"
This allows decentralised decision making for large grained resource allocation - for example should we build a factory for shoes, or for toothbrushes? - and is a good thing, as central planning has been demonstrated to not work if applied to the whole economy. (the converse, no central planning to any of the economy, has also been demonstrated to not work!)
However that accumulation can be (and nowadays usually is) orchestrated by a corporate entity, which in an ideal world would be almost entirely beneficially owned by retirees on an equitable basis.
What has gone wrong, is that the benefits of productivity enhancements (since 1970?) have flowed to capital more so than to workers - which not least prevents them from forming capital themselves (savings/pensions), hence rising wealth inequality.
Maybe, and you really believe that, then you do believe in capitalism as Louis Blanc defined it, even though he invented it as a way to characterize something which he regarded as bad.
But this kind of thing, i.e. capital accumulation by some to the exclusion of others, is, I think, objectively problematic in that it's not really compatible with free markets since capital ownership will be barrier to entry once capital has in fact been accumulated by some to the exclusion of others.
I agree that it is decentralized though, but sort of like how feudalism is decentralized.
What are you suggesting is the alternative? Please don't reference small homogenous countries the size of Minnesota as something that will work for the US.
I am curious: how else would you fund them? I sometimes donate & follow such cases and cancer treatments are expensive, especially experimental, custom ones. Worse, the rarer and more aggressive the disease - the more expensive the treatment and the slimmer the actual chances.
With Universal Health Insurance as all other developed countries do
Thanks. I never understood why intelligent people, comparing for example the German to the US system can even blink and decide that the German system doesn’t work.
Yes, there is quite a bit to improve in the German system. No doubt there. But if I compare it to the abysmal situation in the richest country on this planet, I am left standing awestruck asking myself why. I really, genuinely cannot wrap my head around.
It's largely not up to people. 59% of Americans support Medicare for All[1], including over 1 in 3 Republicans, but how many politicians even talk about it?
[1]https://d3nkl3psvxxpe9.cloudfront.net/documents/econTabRepor... via https://truthout.org/articles/6-in-10-americans-back-medicar...
If you vote republican, you do not "support medicare for all" no matter what you say to the poll.
Your vote has consequences, and republicans have been voting for people who objectively and loudly tell their voters that they have no intention of doing those things.
It's time for people who vote republican to own that they suck at picking who to vote for.
Tons of them also say they want recreational weed, but it's only republicans working to prevent that in most states, often literally ignoring citizen's initiatives and court cases to accomplish that.
I would take my insurance over public German healthcare in an instant. I would not trade.
Now maybe when I stop working that may be a different comparison. And its not like there is a choice, voting for a D doesn't magically get German healthcare.
It's almost like healthcare and the well-being of people should be gasp a non partisan issue.
That doesn't say how you would fund it, only what form of insurance is in place.
If the US were to shift to that model today, a country already heavily in debt would have to either take on more debt PR increase revenues in a manner that they wouldn't have been willing to in order to fund our already growing debts.
The debate over whether public or private healthcare is better is all well and good, but first we should be debating how the US would pay for it in the first place.
A Single-Payer-System would also be cheaper in the US. Nobody expenses as much on administrative cost, nobody pays so much as a % of GDP on Healthcare as you, still you have the worst health outcomes of all developed nations.
Taking into account both the costs of coverage expansion and the savings that would be achieved through the Medicare for All Act, we calculate that a single-payer, universal health-care system is likely to lead to a 13% savings in national health-care expenditure, equivalent to more than US$450 billion annually (based on the value of the US$ in 2017). The entire system could be funded with less financial outlay than is incurred by employers and households
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
Looks like I don't have access to the full paper, but I would be extremely skeptical of any claims with such accuracy or certainty.
The healthcare industry in the US is massive and already full of corruption and inefficiency. Even if we are to assume giving politicians and bureaucracy more control over the system will reduce both issues, we can't predict how successful that will be.
Similar claims were made regarding the hopes for ACA reducing costs and here we are.
You are, of course, aware that the current US single payer system (Medicare) subcontracts their administration to private health insurance companies? And that the "overhead" typically discussed when talking about Medicare doesn't include said companies but is instead only the overhead of what it takes to shovel money from the IRS to private insurance companies?
No, this is not Medicare Advantage, in which Medicare just directly pays private health insurance premiums for enrollees.
The overwhelming administrative cost in the US Health Care System includes all forms of Insurance wether they are private or public. It is around 10%
Other public systems vary between 1-4%
There's also an often-overlooked issue, which is that some of the crowdfunded treatments are for things deemed "experimental" or whatever other label and thus not covered for even an insured person. This situation exists in both public and private healthcare systems. I'm not arguing in favor of a for-profit system with this, but people often miss this when they haven't personally run into uncommon health problems.
If a treatment isn't approved yet, you can usually submit a request for getting it paid.
You need to show that it has a chance of working (literature etc...) and it will be reviewed by a doctor from the "Medical Service" which is independent from the Health Insurers.
If they decide it should be paid, it will be paid (which is most of the time the case).
Otherwise you can go through the social courts. (No court costs for the insured person. You can get a lawyer reimbursed if you're poor)
Interesting. Do people win in any significant number of cases, or is it more like the "appeals" process in for-profit systems, where it's supposedly possible to win but generally does not happen?
From my limited experience it usually already gets approved by the Medical Service.
Especially within the University Hospitals who administer these treatments they already have the experience how to write these applications and know their counterparts
Expensive health treatments can easily bankrupt any western government. None of those developed countries can afford to spend their money indiscriminately on them. So instead they turn to waiting lists, death panels and very often saying no but not in your face (since that is politically frowned upon) but thought delays and countless committees and bureaucracy until the patient expires...
I know that's what you hear and read on Fox News and other "News Sources" daily. But here in Germany, there are no "death panels" or long waiting times for cancer treatment.
Also we don't need "pre-auth" and other Bullshit before we start standard treatments.
The real death panels are sitting in your Insurance Companies Offices as seen by the news coverage around United Healthcare et al lately
I live in Eastern Europe and my "news sources" are friends in hospitals asking us to donate for desperate causes.
Governments-paid treatments are god-sent but many times the funds are limited so they only cover older, cheaper treatments. Approval and funds for newer ones come so late, sometimes too late.
Germany has one of the most developed economies on the planet so naturally has more spend on healthcare. But that can change and when the money is tight, tough choices have to be made. I'd make those choices for myself rather than trust the State to do it for me.
What country are we talking about?
Slovakia?
The German health insurance system also has a deficit of 6 billion euro, while doctors are leaving the profession. Do you think that's sustainable?
For a country with a $4.5 trillion GDP, a 6 billion deficit is a drop in the bucket and easily covered from taxes. It’s just a political question of what you want to fund.
For comparison, the New York City public transport system (MTA) runs a deficit of about $3 billion. Six billion for universal healthcare in a country of 83.5 million people seems like a total bargain.
> Do you think that's sustainable?
Yes.
To help you think a bit more clearly: the health insurance system is not a for-profit system, even though some people mistakenly hold on to the idea that it should be. It is a risk spreading mechanism.
Not everything needs to be profitable.
I lived under the very system this principle enabled and I can tell you that without the profit motive we were cold and starving since there was no motivation for people to work and sew clothes or grow food.
I didn't write "nothing needs to be profitable".
I live under a system where even very expensive treatments are covered by the state using taxpayer money, and I'm not starving. Sometimes you need to optimize for human dignity.
10 Billions of that deficit are coming from the State paying insufficient contributions for unemployed insured people. It is a policy choice to offload those costs onto Publicly-Insured-People (excluding rich and healthy people) instead of funding them through taxes (including those groups).
The German Healthcare System also has some historically developed peculiarities that don't make much sense in today's age, but they are difficult to address without pissing people off (The duality of Private and Public Health Insurance, allowing the first one to get rich and very healthy people out of the risk pool, and then loopholes to switch back into the public system when they grow older and don't want to pay the then high prices in private insurance)
The Hospital Reform is already working to reduce costs by reducing the number of small hospitals, and concentrate them into bigger ones. (As a side effect, quality of care will increase too, since outcomes are correlated with experience)
Also more care will be shifted to outpatient setting.
Otherwise we are fighting with the demographic change. But these problems are also hurting all other developed nations including the US, where funding problems in Medicaid are also expected in the next decades
tl:dr We have problems due to the demographic change, but these are in line with other developed nations. There are some efforts to address them, but politicians are hesitant to do real reforms, because old people have the most voting power
I am yet to see any western nations go bankrupt for universal healthcare.
I have three second-hand cancer experiences from family here in Australia (Dad, Mum and my half-sister - under 35/yo). All three were detected early thanks to regular checkups and screening (covered under Medicare), treated in major hospitals (Dad was in a rural hospital, Mum and half-sister in Metro major city hospitals) and are all alive and certainly not in debt. The biggest cost was parking at the hospital, drinks from the vending machine and the PBS medication (all PBS medicine costs $31.60 for adults, and $7.70 for concessions).
Any PBS medication has the full-cost price printed on the label for reference, more often than not the printed prices go from $300 - $2,000, but I remember that these aren't the full price anyway since our government collectively bargains for cheaper prices on OS medication).
I can't imagine having to pay for treatment AND the insane full price of medications, it must be so much more stressful for families going through cancer treatment.
Americans, don't let the media and your government tell you otherwise. Universal healthcare is cheaper [0] and more effective than whatever archaic system you have now.
I am so god damn proud of our system in Australia, it's not perfect, but damn it's so efficient for critical care, thank heavens for Medicare and the PBS.
Oh and for those that say "well doctors aren't paid very well"... they are. My brother-in-law is a surgeon and he's doing pretty well for himself, bought a new Audi last month for his wife, heading to Europe for a month-long holiday with his family and just moved into a new house.
[0] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.XPD.CHEX.PC.CD?most_...
> I am yet to see any western nations go bankrupt for universal healthcare.
Boy are you in for a ride. France will be first and Germany is on a good track for it within the next two decades.
Western nations do not go bankrupt since they discovered that little trick of printing money until the end of time.
This is actually how the US is getting away with their twice-as-expensive-as-the-rest-of-the-OECD setup for a little while longer.
The end of ACA subsidies is probably gonna collapse that approach.
> but thought delays and countless committees and bureaucracy until the patient expires...
So then you would expect life expectancy in the US to be higher than in Germany, France, UK?
It is not.
> So then you would expect life expectancy in the US to be higher than in Germany, France, UK?
Pretty soon, actually. EU countries are falling further and further behind economically. Health care costs are increasing, taking up an ever increasing slice of the government budget. Labor force participation rate is decreasing due to generous welfare and high taxes. Natality is plummeting. Attempts to increase retirement age are met with riots.
We're a technological backwater. AI research is done in USA and China - the benefits will mainly go there too. We can't even cool our cities: we're losing more people every year to heatwaves than the USA to gun violence. We're closing down nuclear power plants after years of shamelessly funding the Russian war machine for cheap energy.
Years of redirecting defense spending into social programs are coming back to bite us. Russia is hungry and aggressive, while the US is not protecting us anymore. What do you think will be the life expectancy under drone and rocket attacks?
Get real, even the poorest districts in the UK have the same average life expectancy than in the US
American life expectancy compares extremely unfavourably with the UK. The English seaside town of Blackpool has been synonymous with deep-rooted social decline for much of the past decade. It has England’s lowest life expectancy, highest rates of relationship breakdown and some of the highest rates of antidepressant prescribing. But as of 2019, that health-adjusted life expectancy of 65 (the number of years someone can be expected to live without a disability) was the same as the average for the entire US.
https://www.ft.com/content/653bbb26-8a22-4db3-b43d-c34a0b774...
Also what you conveniently forget to mention, all European countries still spend less on Healthcare than the US, as a percentage of their GDP. In absolute numbers this comparison would look even worse
So this isn't Defense Spending redirected to Healthcare
Private/public here in Japan works okayishly well. I have never heard of anyone getting bankrupted over medical bills, and have had loved ones going through surgeries and other complex issues.
As soon as you said "death panels" you invalidated your entire point, I'm sorry.
Did you make all of this up or just so credulous that you repeated what someone else made up?
I don't know, are your opinions about life and reality made up or you're just so credulous you are repeating whatever you see on social media?
Is it so hard to believe in today's day and age that somebody tries to learn and understand how the world around works using observation, published facts and deduction from as close to first principles as possible?
Is there a legitimately good reason for all those treatments to be so expensive, or is that, to a large degree, capitalism extracting capital from the market? Why is American insulin so expensive when compared to that from other countries?
> Is there a legitimately good reason for all those treatments to be so expensive
We can't really know, since only free markets can determine the price of a good or service (it's driven by supply and demand) and health care market is tightly regulated.
> Why is American insulin
Because of the regulatory barriers not allowing other providers to enter and sell insulin on the US market.
Theres a (now old) memo that specifically outlines which talking points carry most salience amongst the audience. Those terms are present here in your comment. (Luntz - The language of Healthcare 2009)
Even with waiting lists, people get healthcare. They get better health outcomes per $ spent. America can provide excellent cutting edge healthcare, which is especially great if you can afford it. At some point, you have to decide whether having most of the bell curve taken care of, is more / less important in terms of rhetoric and priority.
> waiting lists, death panels and very often saying no
As we all know, American insurance companies never deny coverage, nor do you ever have to wait in an American hospital. /s
By tax. If you use taxes for nothing else, at least use them for children with cancer.
No, the root cause is that cancer exists. Or rather, that humans exist at all.
It's all very well and dandy that you can say "actually, there is a larger structural problem underlying it all" when meeting something bad, but it doesn't make that particular bad disappear.
LLMs have found your post and ...
You're absolutely right.
And plane crashes are always caused by gravity.
We have over the years raised billions (maybe trillions) for cancer treatments and we seem to have made negligible progress in actually curing cancer. Will it ever succeed? So maybe there is a root cause for your root cause?
That doesn't seem at all right, even misleading, cancer survivability has significantly improved
Unfortunately "cancer" is a very broad brush that covers a multitude of diseases.
Plus the phrase "cure" does a lot of heavy lifting. People seem to see a win here as being "here's a tablet, all cancer is gone."
So yes, we have spent an insane amount of money that can be ascribed to "cancer". (We've Also spent a lot on heart disease, diabetes and so on.)
But yes, we have got an extraordinary return on money spent. Treatments and survivability of common cancers (breast, prostate etc) have gone through the roof. Better screening, better education and much better Treatments lead to much (much) better outcomes.
Not all cancers are the same though. Some are harder to treat. Some rare ones are hard to investigate (simply because the pool is too small) but even rare cancers get spill-over benefits from common ones.
In terms of "cure" - that's not a word medicals use a lot anyway. Generally speaking we "manage" medical conditions, not cure them. "Remission" is a preferred word to an absence of the disease, not "cure".
In truth, we all die of something. Cancer is usually (not always) correlated with age, and living longer gives more opportunities to get cancer in the first place. So it's not like we can eradicate it like polio.
Progress in cancer treatment has been incredible
Just one example, prostate cancer today has a 90+% 10 year survival rate, in 1970 that was 25%
There are more than 200 known types of cancer, and most are very fundamental and serious. It's not something which can be easily prevented or even fixed by just taking some pill or eating different. Yet, progress has been very phenomenal over the decades. Cancer can be cured to some degree, people can survive, but progress goes type by type.
Untold trillions have been spent fighting wars and yet the cause of war hasn't been solved.
Imagine if those trillions would be spent on research and healthcare
Demonstrably false. There are immunotherapies today that can completely cure cancer.
According to this US government site, 5-year survival rates across all cancer sites have improved from 50% to 75% between 1974 and 2017. (For men it started at more like 40%).
That’s not utterly transformative but I wouldn’t call it negligible either.
https://progressreport.cancer.gov/after/survival
Because doctors are too cowardly to do what needs to be done.
Replace the body.
The only fatal cancer in 2026 should be brain cancer.
The brain cannot function outside the body. The brain needs your bone marrow to make red and white blood cells. The kidneys and the liver to filter and break down metabolic waste. Various other hormonal systems that affect how the brain works (c.f. the HN favorite "gut-brain axis"). A brain separated from the body could survive for a few weeks, but long term it would certainly die from neuron loss (i.e. dementia).
That's on the same level as terraforming Mars to escape climate problems on Earth.
Removing cancer from a body is tremendously simpler than making a new body.
I have reported these ads to YouTube multiple times, because I tracked down their scam websites, but YouTube didn't delete them anyway.
Common pattern they had was:
- similar or same domains
- same messaging on their website
YouTube could have taken action, but it choose not to
I'm still waiting for the tech world to wake up and realise that the online ad machinery and user tracking software that the brightest minds of our generation have been working on are just a way to efficiently connect scammers with their unsuspecting victims.
Oh, they know that. It's very lucrative. At this point it's scams all the way up to the US presidential cryptocurrency.
However it's also a tricky business to be the adjudicator of what is and isn't a scam. You're going to have to deal with a lot of complaints from "legitimate businessmen".
I'm waiting for the non-tech world to wake up and hold companies that act as willing accomplices liable for the crimes they tolerate on their platforms.
> the crimes they tolerate on their platforms.
... the crimes they actually make a lot of money from.
The tech world knows this. They are raking in money off of these scams. People with a rudimentary moral compass leave, those without stay, which makes it even less likely that industry will self-sanitize. The rest of society, out of survival instinct if nothing else, will have to force it to stop anti-social and fraudulent practices. Same as many other industries.
It would help to stop saying "brightest minds of our generation", like we stopped saying "smartest guys in the room".
They are not the brightest, just the ones who sold out others and grabbed the money, with ethics and morals not being sufficient personal barriers.
Calling them the brightest just feeds their belief that they merit the money, and they don't have to ask the real reason they have so much money.
They already know. Meta estimates around 10% of its ad revenue comes from ads for scams or banned goods. https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-is-earning-fortu...
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.
(but enough about LLM shills)
I think being a “Techie” is now something that is splitting.
- People who want to work in tech because it was a stable and/or lucrative career
- People who just want/love to code
- People who loved tech / think tech is cool
There’s also a degree of counter-culture that used to be part of the mix, which got jettisoned as tech became mainstream and mapped out.
The current state of Tech is unpleasant and alarming.
I'm waiting for the tech world to realize that "the brightest minds of our generation" don't actually work at google, because if you are that enormously bright you don't want to work for ads or in an opaque megacorp.
Why does anyone think a brilliant mind would enjoy that? So they could make a little bit more money?
Do you honestly think brilliant people, the smartest of our generation, care about money?
IME, Google software devs aren't even the brightest minds in the parking lot.
Completing large engineering projects says nothing about individual capability, and nothing about how Google deploys shitty AI moderation and about how Google employees insist it's great and perfect and never does anything wrong gives me any reason to believe they are even competent.
It's literally a meme that people started repeating in earnest without a second thought.
Don't you think a brilliant person would work somewhere, like, interesting?
In economies where you aren't rewarded for individual competency (because software management couldn't pick out individual competency if it screamed at them), highly competent people aren't going to play the game, they are just going to find something to pay the bills and work on hobbies.
The smart people are often where the money isn't, because they are rarely driven by monetary pursuits.
There was a period when I was constantly showered with these ads whenever I visited YouTube. It quickly became clear that it was some kind of scam, but YouTube didn't do anything about it for years.
Does clicking on the ad cost the spammer a lot of money
Depends on bot-detection and if its a CPC or CPA campaign
Yes, which is one of two reasons why I use a blocker called adnauseum. It an adv locker that “clicks” on every single ad it sees, as well as hides it from my view. This makes my ad profile useless, and also costs them money.
The question is, is the scammer taking donations from kids with cancer or Google the more worthy entity to profit from the situation? It's a tough decision.
you should probably think about the fact that ad platforms expect and design for fraudulent and bot clicks before you assume that this actually costs anyone money.
> This makes my ad profile useless
I have a theory that it doesn't. Which set of companies' logic is more likely?:
Is LadyCailin a "tree-hugging liberal"? LadyCailin clicked on a lot of Sierra Club and PETA ads, so yes. Good, we will add LadyCailin to this list.
Is LadyCailin an "extremist right-wing nazi"? LadyCailin clicked on a lot of prepper and gold ads, so yes. Good, we will *also* add LadyCailin to this other list.
OR
Is LadyCailin a "tree-hugging liberal"? Well, they clicked on these ads, so we think so, but then they clicked on these other ads, so we're not sure. Then she clicked on these other ads, now we don't have any idea.
Speaking from personal experience: Because some people have used my phone number and email address as their own, I get emails for one political party and text messages for the other political party.
It doesn't make my ad profile useless to the people sending me ads.
Give your phone number to both U.S. political parties. Congratulations you will get spammed by both. I doubt they are cross-checking.
Won’t Google ban your account if they notice this
As per other comments, if it’s making them money, why bother banning it
Once you realize how profitable it is, it's hard to stop. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/06/meta-reportedly-projected-10...
see Meta, which is operating like a crime syndicate, leveraging higher fees on scammers "to discourage" them, retaining their impact on supply side auction prices and well knowing many don't pay with their own credit cards.
https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-tolerates-rampan...
They didn't care about being a huge driver behind a genocide, why would they possibly care about people getting scammed out of cancer fundraiser donations. Once you find out that someone has worked at any point for Meta past say, 2020, you know everything you need about them.
[1] https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...
There's no incentive for them to comply with your request. Like Facebook, scam ads are a revenue stream for Google. The profitability usually offsets any negative PR or fallout that results from these platforms turning a blind eye to the point where their budget accounts for some percentage of scam income, leaving them to pick and choose when to take action while they actively make their platform increasingly hostile to users who want to protect themselves from said ads.
Google, the worlds biggest and best coconspiritor.
That's so Meta.
Scams are extremely high margin businesses and as such can spend very generously on advertising. Consequently the Googles of our world love them.
They also had a pattern of loudly crying kids in the beginning of the video, I thought they were faking, after a month they changed the style of start.
Yep. Lately I've been getting dozens of scam ads for pulse oximeters being sold as Glucose meters, with a big ol' FDA logo plastered over the top of the video. A flagrant violation of regulations around medical device marketing.
Here's Google's response:
...which is a lie, among other things.In my experience, anything related to Google Ads - they never reacts to any claims of scam…
Their incentives contradict healthy behavior… :(
What struck me is that when I reported an ad with an Elon Musk deepfake selling some crypto scam, I got an email back from Google saying that after reviewing the video they found nothing wrong. I don't understand how this is not actionable in court- I mean, you did act on a report, you declare you manually reviewed the content and that it's good for you? I don't get it.
Same. Even if they delete one it's usually delayed for 2-3 days. The worst part about scam ads is that they surface a day later from a different account with 0 changes to the ads themselves. You would think Google would fingerprint the assets but in the end they just don't care.
What's most depressing is that people like you did the right thing (took the time to investigate and report) and still hit a wall
reminder that according to Facebook's own analysis 10% of their 2024 revenue comes from scams and banned products
Really makes me think that the justice system should have a wide margin for discretionary sentencing. I get that in some sense fraud is fraud, but there is one thing preying on people's greed, and another preying on compassion, charity and vulnerable children in desperate need. Scams based on greed (or other vices) are in some sense limited crimes, since their success punishes what is low, but scams based on what is best in us are much wider in their social impact, since they also disincentivize what is most noble.
Then again, maybe we should keep ethics and morals away from law and sentencing, and concentrate on harm and intent.
Laws can be based on ethics, but moral judgments really should not be involved in their application.
Unless you want to live in a theocracy, of course.
The argument is that scams based on exploiting goodness causes a lot more harm compared to the ones based on exploiting greed. Because it trains people that doing good deeds is not worth it (they might be scammed.) And even if the rate of such scams are low, just reading about them makes people afraid of potential consequences of doing good deeds. So I absolutely agree that such scams should have very harsh punishments, because they do not only have immediate consequences, but they degrade trust in our society.
Social mores are synonymous with morals and it is our social mores or our moral values that form the basis of our legal systems where we use those mores (moral values) to define the actions that fall into the categories of right versus wrong and help us define how we should treat each other and what an appropriate societal sanction should be when someone steps over the line and does something to violate our social mores or does something that we consider immoral.
By comparison it is pretty obvious that most societies have similar moral values - stealing is wrong, murder is wrong, charity is right, etc. in spite of the differences in religious interpretations that end up preventing so many of us from simply coexisting as equals.
To suggest that morals are tied to religion is simply wrong. Morals are simple rules that humans have developed over generations of interactions that allow them to apply reasonable judgements to fellow humans based on observations of how those fellow humans interact with strangers and kin.
Religions likely have as part of their foundations, an explicit acknowledgement or recognition of the societal mores that governed human interactions before any one of our ancestors invented or postulated out loud about phenomena that they all experienced but did not yet have the science or understanding of the natural world to reliably explain, thus compelling them to invent entities that controlled those phenomena. Those who chose to believe in these inventions could rest easier knowing that something somewhere was either looking out for them or they could be wary of angering that entity to prevent bad things from happening to them or their kin.
In short, morals and ethics exist outside of any religious dogma so the suggestion that they are a constraint imposed on any society through religion is simply inaccurate since it is not necessary for any person to be religious in order to hold another accountable .
”To suggest that morals are tied to religion is simply wrong.”
No one has suggested that. My comment about theocracies was referring to the way religious morals direct lawmaking in theocracies, leading to things like death penalties for homosexual acts and zero tolerance of religious critique (denial of freedom of expression and persecution of political opposition).
You started off with a suggestion that on the surface implies that morals and ethics are unrelated to perceptions or definitions of harm and intent.
>Then again, maybe we should keep ethics and morals away from law and sentencing, and concentrate on harm and intent.
Morals, our value system developed by our own experiences that determine how we as individuals define right and wrong are the foundation of ethical boundaries that we impose on the groups that we form or join. Ethics are tied to morals.
Harm and intent are judgements that we make either as individuals or as group members when we look at actions and consequences (apply our moral and ethical guidelines) so that we can determine whether sanctions are necessary and reasonable based on our own shared value system.
Then you make a statement that appears to suggest that morals and ethics are unrelated when in fact, our individual morals form the foundation of ethical constraints that we impose on the groups in our societies just as they are the foundation for our religious value systems. In your either/or proposition here you apparently separate laws from morals. I disagree because laws, which follow from our own moral values and are just codified statements defining our own ethical framework so that we can all color between the same set of lines.
>Laws can be based on ethics, but moral judgments really should not be involved in their application.
Then you impose the burden of religion or theocracy with your last statement. This statement implies to the casual observer that since you reject morals (in the second statement) as a basis of laws in favor of laws based on ethics that those which are based on morals exist only under a theocratic framework. Since group ethics follow from shared individual mores this does not make sense.
>Unless you want to live in a theocracy, of course.
Morals, ethics, laws are entangled and require no religious framework for their application though as your examples demonstrate, it is possible to create a system where mores shared and recognized by all are subverted to serve a religious doctrine which is itself a permutation of an ethical system used to capture local groups and to impose a specific reward/sanction value system to aid compliance.
EDIT: I think that your use of "Unless" makes it easy for a reader to interpret the second statement as part of an IF/THEN type of statement implying a conclusion that you have defined in your third statement.
You're explicitly allowing ethics to form the basis of laws in the first part of your second statement and then using the "but" to disallow moral judgments as a basis. This is the IF part of the dialog.
The Unless follows and ends up defining the THEN part of the conclusion so that a reader can interpret your statements to conclude that IF ethics can be the foundation for laws THEN a system of laws based on moral judgments must form the basis for a theocratic system, of course.
What is the definition of right and wrong if NOT a moral one?
Indeed! However, law is not a definition of moral right and wrong; rather, it is a spatiotemporally varying definition of societal and judicial rights, permissions and restrictions of conduct which are usually grounded in the locally prevailing morals.
Law in a democratic society is a manifestation of so-called social contracts considered binding for members of that society.
However, law in a non-democratic society can be the complete opposite, to the point of enabling immoral conduct, including but not limited to legal crime, persecution of political opponents, ethnic cleansing and offensive warfare.
It’s subjective. It’s always subjective. A person can convince themselves they’re right to conduct all sorts of heinous acts if they simply alter their perspective enough.
Morals are fundamental to the process.
Laws aren’t subjective, though. So clearly there is a fundamental difference between laws and morals.
Could we even say laws are the society’s objective morals?
It is a moral one, but laws have no morality.
> maybe we should keep ethics and morals away from law and sentencing, and concentrate on harm and intent
Retribution is a real component of justice. When it's ignored, people take the law into their own hands.
Harsher sentences for despicable crimes makes sense. Automatic sentence enhancers are cruel. But automatically giving the judge the power to sentence for longer based on the victim's profile is not.
The jury pronounces the sentence. What do you think sways the jurors - legalese complexity or straight up morality?
Jurors decide the verdict, the judge determines the sentence.
Whether sentencing should reflect that is a hard question, but pretending all fraud is morally equivalent seems like willful blindness
Great journalism. I hope the authorities bring this person to justice and arrest them for fraud.
I saw this ad a few months ago on YouTube and flagged it as a scam when I couldn’t find much information about the company. Never donate money through random sites. If you use platforms like https://www.gofundme.com/, at least you have the option to file a complaint if you find something suspicious.
> I hope the authorities bring this person to justice and arrest them for fraud.
They haven’t scammed nor inconvenienced a rich, well-connected person, so unlikely anything will happen. Remember that online fraud is effectively legal (10% of Meta’s revenue is from scam ads by their own estimates) as long as you only target the poor.
These scam campaigns have been going for years with people operating in the field across many countries - if there was an incentive to stop this it would’ve been done already, but since everyone’s making money why bother?
> file a complaint if you find something suspicious
Which will be piped to /dev/null, just like reporting scams on social media.
Tangentially related - If you aren’t aware, there are out of court settlement bodies which exist as part of the DSA.
If you have content which is removed, or a moderation decision you wish to dispute, you can go to one of these bodies to get it reviewed. It cannot go to dev/null.
This doesn’t address whether flagging scams resulted in action. The bigger picture is the mismatched incentives for tech. Platforms are not quite incentivized to care about responding to user complaints, and do not give out information that lets us know what is happening independently.
To get to the point that complaints are actioned, those incentives need to be realigned. The ODS pathway, if used more frequently, increases that revenue and market pressure.
The ODS system is new, and I expect it will have tons of issues to discover. I wouldn’t be surprised it it is already weaponized.
On the flip side, platforms haven’t been tested or queried in this manner before.
Trump will probably compliment him, call him smart and pardon him. https://ag.ny.gov/press-release/2019/donald-j-trump-pays-cou...
It's worth noting that if the suspect is in Israel, and he nerds to be tried in the US it might be an uphill battle trying to get him extradited.
https://jacobin.com/2023/02/israel-law-of-return-extradition...
It definitely seems uphill but not infinitely so.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-55795075.amp
Though that case, returning an alleged, now convicted child rapist took decades.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malka_Leifer_affair
As a not-Israeli Jew the reluctance of the Israeli government to send alleged criminals for trial overseas doesn’t make me happy, but I also remember that there are some reasons for this.
Unfortunately many countries have blanket extradition bans. US is one of the worst - it caused a lot of tension in the past when they wouldn't extradite IRA bombers but got UK to agree to extradite anyone US wanted.
Side-note: imagine how much work law enforcement has put into these kinds of cases over the years only for the perpetrators of fraud to be pardoned.
Can't imagine how many people who work in law enforcement are furious with the current administration.
According to the article Erez Hadari, the man supposedly affiliated with the organization, is in Canada at the time of writing
It’s so predictable by this point
Do you believe all countries should automatically extradiate every person any other country demands? Or that there should be a limit on such process?
Israel is a special case.
No it's not.
Our greatest ally
No, but the pattern of criminals of Jewish background fleeing to Israel for protection after commiting a crime, is too often to ignore.
Same thing happened in my post communist country and the neighboring country too. Perp stole tens of millons through a banking scam in the 90s, then fled to Israel because he was Jewish and claimed persecution.
At which point should the pattern be acknowledged?
And did you ask Israel for extradition? What his name was? And is this pattern actually unique to Israel or would you find other examples of people escaping to where the law can't reach them? If Israel wanted to convict a dual citizen who fled to your country, what is the required process?
No, the leaders of my country didn't try any of that. You were the first person to think about those things. I'll pass on your suggestions and hopefully everything gets resolved.
Instead of being sarcastic you could be good faith and provide further information and explore what happened and explain what do you think Israel should do differently?
>Instead of being sarcastic you could be good faith
What was bad faith? I told you what happened. I was sarcastic because your comment was redundant and didn't add anything to the conversation, only instigating.
> and provide further information explore what happened
How does that change the situation? Are you the head prosecutor of Israel and looking to rectify the situation?
>what you think Israel should do differently?
Extradite them or put them in jail over there and stop being a safe heaven for criminals.
Becuase you made an argument with a single supporting example yet didn't name any name that could be used to verify what you said and let other people judge the case nor have you explained at any point of there was any court procedure in Israel about extradition and whatever he ended up extradited. How are we supposed to disscus particulars like that? Resorting to sarcasm so fast that you aren't interested in genuine discussion. Furthermore if he wasn't extradited, you could use this discussion to make him more (in)famous.
> How does that change the situation? Are you the head prosecutor of Israel and looking to rectify the situation?
You were claiming that many criminals abuse Israel extradition system to esapce the law. I was making (implicit) claim that there is nothing special about it and if there was abduance of such cases is merely because more people in your country had means to escape to Israel than to other places. As already explained you provided a sole lacking in information example and I wanted more.
And because you were being glib, I will be too, yes for all you know I am Israel's head prosecutor.
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I literally conceded that "As for the rest of them they need to be considered" (for extradition). Yes I think this conversation is at end of usefullness. Israel has good reasons form their perspective to why they give citizenship easily and pretty much all countries don't give up their citizens without good cause (I read about a case where France didn't want to extradite to Israel because they aren't part of the EU so it wasn't legal. At the end France court sentenced them, so Israel should do the same).
I love the photo the guy sent, of himself sitting in a first-class airplane seat.
https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/1536/cpsprodpb/b676/live/3589b...
He will soon move to Israel and escape his punishment.
Isn't that just for "jewish" pedos and rapists?
Everyone associated with this seems to be Jewish. Israel is a haven for criminals of all types, we just care extra about any haven for pedos and rapists, but white collar criminals are terrible, too
Many such cases
This is part of the reason that people do not donate.
At least not when some rando stops you on the street.
I always donate to the random homeless people stopping me on the street. Doesn't really matter to me what they do with it, whatever keeps them warm.
Unfortunately in Europe these can also be scams, there are some people who will dress up homeless but are actually just begging for profit.
They're easy to recognize, because they're very forceful in their begging, relying more on intimidation than compassion.
There really is no level people won't sink to for some money.
Yes most are really scams, often also adults that claim for their poor small children with the same sign for decades (maybe that are eternal young children, that also are stable across different parents, because they also share that across different people sometimes) or whole families, that suddenly surround you. I mean these are also poor people, but the money you donate to them, won't go to them.
Once you meet a real poor, it's obvious. You meet them outside of reasonable business hours, they are obviously a native, ashamed to ask for help and actually like to have a conversation.
Sadly, this. There are even networks. I know a person who begs on a specific interval of a subway line, has been for at least a decade, and has been pretty violent towards actual beggars who did not know the rules.
Some are genuine. People who went into debt, with health issue that prevented them from ever repaying it, fleeing from families so as not to burden them...
Smugglers who were found out, left with an unpayable amount of debt while the politicians that used to protect them went without punishment.
Some of those are also human trafficking victims (at least in Europe). There are gangs that illegally bring them over the border, force them to beg on the streets, and take the money they get.
The actual homeless people here have access to government support and shelters, those beggars don't as they're not here legally.
The trick is donate at the park where they camp out, not on the street.
The first trick is having a bit of local knowledge. If (say) they're outside begging money "for food" at the same time as the local homeless shelter is serving a free dinner...yeah.
> there are some people who will dress up homeless but are actually just begging for profit.
This always reminds me of the Sherlock Holmes short story - The man with the twisted lip
> They're easy to recognize, because they're very forceful in their begging, relying more on intimidation than compassion.
This is very common in India. These so called beggars harass and target people at their weakest and happiest moments like at funerals or birth of a child, wedding or housewarming parties. I've heard of these people earning enough to own houses in multiple cities.
I think parent commenter was talking about random people "working"[1] for charities and stopping you on the street. If one wanted to donate, why would they do it through a stranger on the street and not directly to their website?
However, if you give a homeless person money and they go buy drugs, I think you effectively made them poorer. I would advise giving them food instead.[2]
[1]: Word in quotes because there is no way to verify their identities.
[2]: I've literally seen a person asking for money get offered free fries at McDonald's and denying them. Beggars don't get to be choosers.
Let them buy what they need I think. They dont have the ability to stop being addicted in 60 seconds because logic. If that were possible we could collapse the entire weight loss industry, gambling, need for AA and NA meetings, entire narco infrastructure at the click of a finger.
If they told you it was to buy drugs, would you still give them money? It's not different from giving them the drugs directly.
I would personally prefer to give money to someone that needs it to eat.
Yeah I admit I am in two minds. Id rather the state give them clean safe pure drugs and then help them get off the drugs with naltrexone or whatever is best.
Outside of drugs and drink they can spend it how they like. They choose the food or maybe save for a hotel night.
Not every homeless person needs or wants food at every single time. Certainly not fast food fries covered in salt that get nasty if not eaten right away, that’s not a meal.
Sometimes a homeless person needs a blanket, or a bus ticket, or just a safe place for a few hours.
If you don’t want to give money, that’s your prerogative, but don’t simply assume food. Ask.
I completely get your point and you are right.
However, understand the context: the beggar entered a McDonald's and asked clients that were currently eating for money. He got offered the fries of a woman who didn't finish them. So there was no poisoning (I think this is very much an American problem, where I don't live) possible—except if you consider McDonald's to be poison in the first place.
In my experience, people don't give cash to beggars anymore. Everyone has their reason, but I think the fact that a lot of beggars were not really in need hasn't helped. But I think many would be open to give food or donate useful objects instead (which they don't have at hand when being begged).
> However, understand the context: the beggar entered a McDonald's and asked clients that were currently eating for money. He got offered the fries of a woman who didn't finish them.
Consider the beggar’s context too. How many times per day/week must they go into that McDonald’s? Leftover fries are probably what they get offered the most. You can accept it a few times, but after a while they provide neither pleasure nor sustenance.
> In my experience, people don't give cash to beggars anymore.
Anecdotally, seems about right.
> But I think many would be open to give food or donate useful objects instead (which they don't have at hand when being begged).
Again, I agree, but I don’t think anyone asks either. One possible workaround would be to donate to your local food bank or another organisation you trust, then when asked by a beggar direct them there. Though that could be another can of worms depending on where one lives.
I agree with your comments.
The person denied the fries without adding anything and left. This makes everyone who heard that the beggar didn't need food. Otherwise he'd have asked for something else (even food from the supermarket nearby).
I have on several occasions offered to pay for food at a nearby sandwich shop or fast food place for beggars who were asking for money for food. None of them accepted the offer.
Yep - I do the same thing. Offer to take them anywhere they want to go and get a meal. I used to get takers, but I haven’t in the last 10 years or so.
I once exited an excellent Indian restaurant in San Diego with a bag of takeout food I had just picked up. Someone approached me and asked me for some money “to buy a burger”. I offered him my food bag and said it’s really good, fresh, and I just picked it up.
He took the bag, waited until I wasn’t looking, then set it down on the sidewalk and walked away. He was not interested in food, nor was he hungry.
Then why are almost all of them aggressive when I say that I won't give money but offer food instead?
You say "Ask"? I did. I just heard some rehearsed story Oh, your son is sick?" With what exactly? What kind of drugs he need, I can help? Result -> anger. I get more aggression from asking and trying to get helpfull than simply saying "no." I have tons of examples.
Why do they NEVER ask for a job? Why don't they ever offer to do the manual labor I was doing? I would be glad to let them do it and pay for it.
One time they stole my phone. A guy just came near me with a sign, put it on the table while begging, and simply garbed it and have runned away. That was end of I line for me.
Why do they reek of alcohol or drugs?
I used to offer help to people, but after they stole my phone, I just scream "NO." I never want to be stolen from again. I donate to some charities, but that is the end of the line for me. I don't want to pay a guy that is begging out of habit just to buy drugs. I don't want to pay women sedating their children or using them on the street just to earn money. Just watching them beg behind the building.
My main point is that I never could understand the aggression towards the homeless until I was stolen from. My street was filled with alcoholics living in cars, screaming random stuff, and fighting with passersby and each other.
Do you really think they want an answer, or anything else other than buying their drugs? I was really hating people like me, but in the end I was discovered why do they react with defense and aggression. But of course I would be glad to pay for food nonetheless and try to help with anything expect money and I pay for charities that try to provide medical healthcare in places like Gaza, but I don't believe that people in London (for example) need more and places like Gaza.
You literally gave an example of a beggar who is being a chooser. It sounds like they very much can be.
Guess what they got with their behavior? Nothing. No food and no money.
> I think parent commenter was talking about random people "working"[1] for charities and stopping you on the street.
I’m old enough to remember the Moonies with flowers at the airport[0].
[0] https://youtu.be/Ls_qFlF2gHw?si=znZJsjki-QLq5J1A (this actually was inspired by real behavior)
Fries are not healthy. You might be a health conscious beggar. Of course beggars can choose.
The guy was begging in a McDonald's...
Because fast food restaurants get a lot of foot traffic and they’re less likely to be aggressively thrown out. Another popular place to beg are subway stations, but that doesn’t mean they need a ticket.
Did anyone ask what the money was for? Did anyone offer to buy whatever it was they needed, even if a meal at a better place? Or was the interaction to simply offer fries (probably the least filling, cheapest, far from healthy choice that they likely have been offered dozens of times already) and then do nothing when they refused?
> Because fast food restaurants get a lot of foot traffic
Which isn't their strategy because the beggar spent probably 2 minutes in the restaurant.
It's not rare to see a beggar ask for money to "get food", get offered food and then decline.
Who am I to judge what they do with their money? I couldnt possibly know if they are allergic to something. Also not every homeless person is an addict. Even beggars can have agency over their resources. An addiction is not for me to solve, first things first should be to cover their basic needs, only then you can work on an addiction. Money is the easiest thing to give.
Oh I'm not saying they don't. But I think you can understand why it's ridiculous to give money to someone and see them buy drugs.
So if you give them food directly, you're certain where your money goes. You also eliminate the false homeless people (similar to the example I gave).
You should know that for an addict, the “next fix” is the first “need” that gets met. I am not convinced it is ethical to supply money to a pipeline to drug dealers.
Weed is legal where I live. They don't fund drug dealers. They fund local business.
Though that local business currently funds some sketchy Chinese crime ring so.....
I just don't care. I'm not trying to "save" them, I'm throwing a little expendable resources at a human being and hoping it somehow makes their miserable life a little less miserable and sometimes drugs and alcohol are exactly that.
I've had half a mind to just hand out joints before, but I actually think they DON'T want that.
When I want to help "rescue" homeless people like that, I give money and resources to local institutions that know how to do it.
I really don't think panhandling has ever really fixed a homeless situation. It's not exactly a job you can put on your rental application. What do I care whether the dude who spends every day on the same street corner at 0 degrees smokes some weed or not? Why should literally anyone care? I haven't seen him in a while, so he might just be dead now.
Meanwhile the people who are "temporarily homeless" rarely get to take the good panhandling spots.
I know all too well how close I have come to that exact life, and how much people like you would sneer "Oh he's just an addict, not worth compassion"
Addiction is rarely fixed by homelessness and suffering for starters.
I dont give a shit about a pipeline of drug dealers but I give a shit about humans. They are victims of a state that let them down. Them freezing to death or whatever doesn't show them drug dealers, its simply ignoring a person in need. But doesn't surprise me that people in a tech forum have little to zero empathy or pull some tinfoil hat theory out of their ass just so they can justify not giving anyone anything.
As a former homeless person, good on you. I will say, don't feel pressured to, a chat or a nice comment actually means as much, it reminded me I was human.
Oh its usually accompanied with a chat, here in Germany often times they just need some money to stay the night somewhere. However some just tell you whatever story to get their next high. Whatever floats their boat, to me its just sad that such a rich country doesn't help them while actively making being homeless harder for them. It's almost christmas and really cold out there, I know there are so many people freezing to death. What good does my money do when I invest it into some imaginary assets or kept it on my bank forever...
Germany does help them, it just requires they either apply for work or prove that they are unfit for work. Not the most pleasant thing to do, sure, but no German is forced to beg on the streets.
> no German is forced to beg on the streets.
This is such an uneducated and entitled comment just showing how little regular people know about this situation in Germany. Its also one of the most commonly used arguments on this topic and its simply not true. Homeless shelters are overcrowded and extremely unhygienic. Our infrastructure isn't made for an ever-growing amount of homeless people. Law, rights and reality sadly grow appart heavily. "Die Tafel" is completely overwhelmed too. This statement might have been true 15 years ago but you should re-educate yourself on the topic.
> Homeless shelters are overcrowded and extremely unhygienic.
It's not just the hygiene. it's that in those shelters you're constantly surrounded by a few mentally ill and possibly violent people who will lash out in unpredictable ways and make life worse for everyone with their constant tics and noises making you live in constant anxiety.
If you're homeless but not mentally ill yet, then being in such an environment everyday will definitely negatively affect your sanity as your daily struggle becomes surviving the shelter, instead of working to getting back on your feet. Kind of like being locked up in a prison but from which you can leave.
So then no wonder a lot of homeless people feel safer and less stressed just living and sleeping in public areas than in shelters.
Where I live our homeless shelters are hygienic and not overcrowded (they will not go over capacity, ever, due to health code / liability reasons).
They are usually not full either. However they have a strict no drugs, no alcohol, and no fighting policy. That means a lot of people aren’t interested in going to them.
Ah good on you! You seem like a lovely person. Some absolutely do tell you a story to get a fix, and it is tricky. I visit Berlin often for work, and the sheer number of homeless people I have met and chatted to who seem to have become homeless due to a lack of mental health support is extremely sad. I suspect it will only get worse. I was lucky to be homeless in London respectfully weather wise, I can't imagine being homeless in Berlin as it is so cold.
This isn't for you as you do plenty but incase others read this, but if you happen to ever see a thick coat in a charity shop, second hand store, or thrift store (whatever you call it) and it is quite cheap, do buy it as there are many charities that take them to give to homeless people.
> whatever keeps them warm.
lol more like whatever keeps their heroin dealer warm
That can cause perverse incentives such as children taken out of school so they can beg full time, such as this - https://archive.is/32Btf five of them are now dead as a result.
yes contribute to their suicide, smart.
True should just ignore them like reasonable people and let them freeze in winter so the authorities can pick up their bodies and dispose of them. Did you ever buy a friend of yours a wine for birthday? Or did you go to McDonalds with your kids? Congrats you contributed to their suicide.
In some American cities I’ve noticed a lot of seemingly homeless women with kids standing on street corners, that are actually Romanian scammers (“gypsies”). People have caught them drugging their babies to make them compliant with sitting under the hot sun all day. And at the end of the day they climb into a Benz because they aren’t actually in need. It really sucks for the people who are truly in need.
These are really common in Germany as well. It is often the same people in the same places and they have business hours, coffee breaks and shift rotations.
> at the end of the day they climb into a Benz
I'll take "Things That Never Happened" for $200, Alex.
This is an urban legend in every city I've ever lived in.
And he stood up out of the wheelchair and walked to his Mercedes and drove away and that's why I never give to homeless people (or formal charities).
Sadly such things do happen:
https://metro.co.uk/2017/02/20/gang-of-beggars-pictured-gett...
I look forward to you donating that $200 to a homeless charity, KingMob.
I can't attest to the other parts, but I can attest to the nice cars part.
It has happened.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=CynYgP8PcWc
all the big charities are scams, my partner works for an adjacent industry
I've worked with an organisation that was on the receiving end of a popular charity, and they definitely got something (new playground equipment for disabled children). Can't say how efficient the charity was, but there are definitely charities that don't keep all the money for themselves.
Maybe not scams, but I agree they are bad.
I always tell people to donate as local as possible. Ideally local Shelters, Churches (that take in everyone) etc...
Part of comfy self-excuse for sure. And then burn the money on junk food, legal or illegal drugs or worse.
Why should somebody donate to somebody else's luxuries if they could spend it on their own luxuries?
Anyway, yes, direct donation is always better, be it to some random guy down on his luck in the street (unless they have just missed their bus and need ticket money for the next one and so for 3 years in the same bus station) or to some trusted person/group who actually does deliver the stuff to the area. Way too many random NGOs have popped up in Europe promising to do good things, just transfer money to their bank account and they will take care of it all for you.
Even "legit" NGOs have a huge overhead.
Surely they'll be using AI to make these videos in the not too distant future.
This is already happening alot with gaza. On Mastodon wehad manyduplicate accounts with very similar AI videos asking for money...
"They were always looking for beautiful children with white skin." But most of the children in the video appear to be non-white. So they're not even good at anti-affirmative-action?
Possibly it means white by the standards of the culture and language the statement was made in.
Or it's just BBC doing BBC stuff.
it's likely referring to colorism within the country, generally lighter is viewed as favorable
Again some Israeli connection in a scam, search google and browse "fintelegram" you will see the biggest and baddest financial crime actors are all based in israel.
So what? Every Israeli now is a scammer? Are you racist?
Do you know how many scammers are from India? Do you know how many scammers are from the US? Jeffery Epstein was from the US, is every US citizen now a pedophile?
How the country origin is related to them being scammers? They're scammers because they're shitty people, it's not related where they're from.
The vast majority of fraud have noting to do with Israel wage theft is enormous everywhere and have nothing to do with Israel, the biggest fraudsters in history (mostly scams on USA investors like Theranos and 2008 crisis) according to quick Google have nothing to do with Israel. The obvious attempts to mafacture a negative image couldn't be more obvious.
all of the content on your site is clearly LLM-generated
This is an ad-hominem attack, not cool.
not mine, they started using ai images a lot though lately but check the old articles.
the content itself is also LLM-generated. go ahead, just say what you mean.
This is nothing new, greedy bast*rds taking advantage of desperate people.
In this book an old NGO worker explain very well how it work the business: https://books.google.dk/books/about/Blanco_bueno_busca_negro...
A simple way to solve this would be to have some kind of gov certification process.
Which could also include a QR code going to a gov website with details why this org was given the certification.
This isn't perfect but would certainly lower such incidents.
The world seems to be full of virtuous sounding organisations who are actually evil.
Fraud in cancer research is sadly prevalent.
France cancer fraud trial begins (1999) [0] (the head of the charity was found guilty, imprisoned, and fined)
[0] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/352075.stm
I would extend it to fraud in charities in general. Trusting a third party (unknown to you) to handle your money responsibly is not a smart move.
Are you saying all charities are frauds? That's how that comes across.
I'm saying you have no way of knowing, so the potential is always there.
BBC has some details, I was disheartened as a Canadian to learn someone living in Canada is behind it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dj3lTCiv6I0
I am not religious. But if there is hell…
There is not in the religion of the alleged key player in the scam.
One of the others might make an exception to allow them in theirs.
In a lawless world, I'd like to show them hell!
I recall seeing these ads, I thought the whole thing was fake to be honest - which it really felt it was due to the obvious staging and scripting.
I thought they were AI due to the heavy use of filters / AI enhancement.
Not a great look for Israel
Why do we keep allowing greedsters to eat our culture alive?
This has to be one of the most vile scams I've ever seen. Hopefully with awareness will come justice.
To be clear: the children are not scammed. They're (unwitting) paid photo props. The people giving are scammed out of millions.
I think the kid in the article who got $27k raised in his name for cancer treatment, received $0 in cancer treatment from those funds, and subsequently died of cancer definitely got scammed.
If I come up to you and show you a photo of an elephant and keep the $100 you gave me to help it, did you get scammed, or did the elephant?
False equivalence. In your straw man, the elephant isn't misled into believing that by posing for a photo it could be "helped," nor is it possible to communicate such an idea to an elephant. In the story, money was raised for the boy's cancer treatment, and that money was improperly withheld, denying him the treatment those funds could have provided. He was harmed by that, and by being misled into thinking he could get treatment by appearing in the video, he was scammed. Lying to the family and stating the funds weren't raised is also scamming them.
But, of course, you know that, but you would rather dig and (try to) play semantic games than admit you are wrong. Do better.
If BBC journalists can donate $5 and see the counter move, how are these campaigns not triggering internal red flags?
These campaings? I've paid some minimal cursory attention to 2 pretty randomly chosen charities - once i donated an old car, and another time i thought may be to subscribe to do math tutoring to children, the tutors were unpaid volunteers, and i just looked into what financial info was available for that non-profit ... well after those 2 times i've never even thought about any dealing with any non-profit, etc. and the stories in the news like when a famous radio talk show host would fund raise huge money to be later paid from his non-profit to his vacation ranch business, all in the open daylight, don't surprise me at all or all those stories of Trump's charities.
Wow, what a blast from the past -- I went to high school with a guy named Erez Hadari.
There’s a photo of this person in the article, you can verify if it’s the same person you know
Great investigative journalism. And so, so sad that these hopeful parents were scammed. Terrible that someone could do this to a child. The conclusion doesn’t give me hope though. The alleged scam organizations didn’t respond to questions and … that’s it? No one is going to jail?
Well before one can go into jail there must be a trial. I am not religious but for people like this I sometimes hope hell would exist.
there's also "remand" or detention before trial. One example where this is common is when there's a flight risk, or a risk the subject will influence the investigation.
Maybe for this case Batman would be a better solution. Hell would not prevent the damage being done on the short term.
What do you think the effect would be if, after a trial, everyone in the scam organization was executed?
I am strongly against the death penalty, so I dont want to imagine a scenario in which this happened. Maybe there should be regulations in place making it so that only registered groups can start donation campaigns. Its a legislative failure. So many crimes are legislative failures...
I think the existing penalties would be deterrent enough. The problem is the criminals know they’ll probably get away with it.
How about if they were deliberately given cancer via some means and then legally barred from receiving any treatment for it?
Since that’s what they did to their victims.
That's probably too harsh, unless it can be proved without doubt that exactly and only due to this X (many) children died and would (with high probability) live otherwise. Thats China level of dealing with similar situations, plus probably harvesting organs for additional profit afterwards and sending bullet receipt to the family.
There are many existing punishments - go after all their wealth, family and connected business, trusts etc. Simply ban them from western financial world. Publicly shame them and make their name a curse to spit on. Properly harsh jail and making sure all inmates know who arrived, I wouldn't expect kinder treatment than pedophiles get. And so on.
What kind of monsters would do this... so angry!
Scammers should get the death penalty.
Honestly sometimte people are the absolute worst - I feel like there no bottom to depravity.
> One year later, Khalil died.
These monsters.
I remember there was a flood of similar campaigns on Facebook a couple years ago. Multiple pages, some posts sponsored, some gaming the algorithm, very similar messaging. All about children suffering from cancer. All leading to scammy-looking domain names, some using IDNs. I had been wondering where the catch was, then got tired and just started reporting and blocking them until they stopped.
What kind of monsters would do this?! Pure evil, makes me so angry!
Of all the people that you can scam, why go for children with cancer. I guess you think they are an easy target because they are desperate? Pure sociopath mentality. Crab mindset.
In case any sociopath is reading this: just go for old rich people. They are also desperate because they are alone, seeing their relevancy wane, and their deaths are closer every day. A single successful scam will represent a bigger return of your invested time and effort than, compared 10 successfully scammed children with cancer. And they might not even make a fuss if you steal some money from them, it will make them look weak and it will only represent a small percentage of their wealth.
And you are less likely to be killed by a mob, as a bonus.
I mean Musk almost singlehandedly has killed hundreds of thousands of kids worldwide in 2025 alone by destroying USAID medicine and basic nutrition distribution, while it literally rots in warehouses now
If we are going to have cancer stories and gun violence stories daily in the news, shouldn't the kids dying be a daily coverage?
Credit to BBC who every few weeks does show the kids dying in the hospital but US news does not mention it anymore since the summer
Still dying. More in 2026. Even more in 2027. Even more in 2028.
Even if USAID is restored in 2029 it will take awhile to rebuild and all those dead kids aren't coming back ever.
Oh and they didn't just quietly die. They suffered for weeks, months and died
Musk did that. But yeah keep using X and buying his cars
It is disgusting that those with health issues are scammed. I do think these instances require extra time on sentences. As someone who was a regular at a cancer hospital in my life, there is nothing harder than seeing a child and a parent who are clearly going through so much at a hospital at 8am. You realise all that they have gone through the whole time, and how much their life has changed, possibly permanently. It is hard for an adult, of course it is, but children have done nothing for this to happen.
""...Well- What does he deserve? To be shot? To be shot for the satisfaction of our moral feelings? Speak, Alyosha!"
"To be shot" murmured Alyosha, lifting his eyes to Ivan with a pale, twisted smile."
"Bravo!" Cried Ivan delighted.
The BBC has increasingly been anti-semitic. First, the baseless allegations of starving and murdering children in Gaza and now this. Troubling times.
How is the article anti-semitic?
So, exposing jew criminals is anti-semitic?
Always has been ;)