"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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
”
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>>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.
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.
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.”
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.
"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.
> 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.
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.
Strong and prosperous economy built by progressive tax rate that used to tax up to 70% of non-work income, and now tax most of it 27-29% (depending on the corporate taxe of the state). The people who can use loopholes to avoid income taxes also pay reduced consumption tax (they usually pay the 'Use tax' rather than sale tax in the US, and can basically ignore VAT in Europe).
Sure, capitalism isn't perfect. No economic system is, mainly because they're all composed of us semi-evolved chimps. Every economic system has that problem. Getting rid of or severely constraining economic freedoms isn't a solution, it makes it worse.
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?
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.
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)
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
stop talking about the middle ages, you really want google to say yes to that, mate all am saying all the big financial fraud operations has Israelis involved, look up "Banc de Binary" all started from their continues till now and worse!
"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?
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.
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.
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.
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 feel like I'm missing the "Jew hate fest." Genuinely I don't see it here, except maybe one comment saying that Israel does not extradite criminals. . . Which is pretty neutral in tone to be honest.
What does one man living in Canada have to do with how much people in Israel love children? There have been many frauds of cancer in children. Here https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-12-14/sa-couple-alleged-fak... is one, an Australian couple asking donations for a fake cancer. Is it reasonable to believe Australia doesn't like children because of it? No in fact it so ridiculous that even asking it is frankly stupid.
If the scammer were Muslim, many people would have no issue ascribing blame to swathes of people with the same religion, calling the religion itself cancer.
Huh, maybe people can ask for donations to be cured of that "cancer"...
This is a lie. Pakistani Muslims systematically raped 10,000s of European children, and murdered many of them and almost every part of the UK government and all of western media went into overdrive to cover it up.
When statistics in Norway indicated that almost all assault rapes are committed by immigrants, they stopped publishing statistics.
Western establishment covers for Muslims while demonizing Jews and Christians.
No Jews no news. Pakistanis can rape and murder 10,000s of European children, but it get's no news. If something can even almost be connected to a Jew then it becomes front page news. Just garden variety systemic Jew hate.
It was a quip about Israel military explicitly killing children. Not very tasteful, but it clearly wasn't about this particular scam.
By the way, indiscriminately bombing children seems to be more acceptable than opening fire on them for some reason, so maybe Israel military should stick to its guns.
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...
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.
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.
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.
The incentives are there. Our economy runs on incentives. Create a vulnerable group and the sharks smell blood in the water.
I mean almost the entirety of the US healthcare system is a industrialized scam engineered by middlemen
Same with education. I am more than happy to pay taxes for an education system, even if I do not personally have children.
Public health systems vary with country. Private advocates say public sucks, until it is their turn to be scammed.
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'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.
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.
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
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.
Money goes in, and good feelings come out. It certainly serves a purpose, but not the intended one.
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.
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.
There are plenty of capitalist nations that provide public healthcare on a large spectrum of coverage and quality.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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"?
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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 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.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/danalexander/article/the-defini...
Most of his added wealth comes from "crypto" and name licensing.
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.
[1]https://d3nkl3psvxxpe9.cloudfront.net/documents/econTabRepor... via https://truthout.org/articles/6-in-10-americans-back-medicar...
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.
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)
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.
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...
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
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.
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.
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 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_...
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.
The end of ACA subsidies is probably gonna collapse that approach.
So then you would expect life expectancy in the US to be higher than in Germany, France, UK?
It is not.
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.
As we all know, American insurance companies never deny coverage, nor do you ever have to wait in an American hospital. /s
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.
Just one example, prostate cancer today has a 90+% 10 year survival rate, in 1970 that was 25%
That’s not utterly transformative but I wouldn’t call it negligible either.
https://progressreport.cancer.gov/after/survival
Replace the body.
The only fatal cancer in 2026 should be brain cancer.
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.
You're absolutely right.
Common pattern they had was:
- similar or same domains
- same messaging on their website
YouTube could have taken action, but it choose not to
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".
... the crimes they actually make a lot of money from.
- 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 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.
https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-tolerates-rampan...
Their incentives contradict healthy behavior… :(
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/1536/cpsprodpb/b676/live/3589b...
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...
https://jacobin.com/2023/02/israel-law-of-return-extradition...
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?
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.
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.
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.
The actual homeless people here have access to government support and shelters, those beggars don't as they're not here legally.
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.
I would personally prefer to give money to someone that needs it to eat.
Outside of drugs and drink they can spend it how they like. They choose the food or maybe save for a hotel night.
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).
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).
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.
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)
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).
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?
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.
lol more like whatever keeps their heroin dealer warm
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.
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.
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.
I'll take "Things That Never Happened" for $200, Alex.
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.
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).
I always tell people to donate as local as possible. Ideally local Shelters, Churches (that take in everyone) etc...
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.
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.
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
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.
These monsters.
And you are less likely to be killed by a mob, as a bonus.
Where are you seeing the hate?
Huh, maybe people can ask for donations to be cured of that "cancer"...
When statistics in Norway indicated that almost all assault rapes are committed by immigrants, they stopped publishing statistics.
Western establishment covers for Muslims while demonizing Jews and Christians.
By the way, indiscriminately bombing children seems to be more acceptable than opening fire on them for some reason, so maybe Israel military should stick to its guns.