Netflix is already on the way down. They infused all of their new shows with wokeness. Every new show feels like woke concepts are shoehorned in without regard for their impact on the story that's told.
Look at the Witcher for an example. Or if you want to see this kind of shift happening over the course of a show, look at Madam Secretary. Season 1 didn't feature any of this crap and showed a strong woman main character that wasn't shoehorned in, by the last season everything was about "hurr durr let's ban guns and white men suck".
I'm not even white and I can notice the excellent storylines being ruined. It's like the writers don't know how to write a story with woke concepts that's actually strong so instead they shove it into every successful show until the show isn't successful anymore. HBO and Disney are going to eat their lunch at this rate with more compelling content.
I don't totally agree that this is a problem, but to be fair, every network is doing this. Even previously silly and light-hearted TV shows like Brooklyn Nine-Nine have become noticeably heavier as they try to shed light on real-world social issues. There's nothing specific to Netflix here.
If it were done well it would be one thing but it’s typically just thinly veiled (DNC) propaganda. Not much to be said on always climbing record fentanyl overdoses, class issues, etc though. If they were actually talking about anything of value to the vast majority of working people instead of rhetoric that’s specifically designed to keep them divided and afraid of each other I wouldn’t complain.
I didn’t say comedy specifically, no. But comedy should probably actually be funny and not feel like I’m being lectured to, which has become increasingly common. And at times comedy can cover even the darkest topics, that’s really up to the comedian to decide.
And I actually consider myself a leftist I just strongly dislike corporate Democrats. So if I sound like right wing propaganda that comes mainly for our mutual distaste for certain aspects of “progressives” in the U.S. or whatever you’d like to call them.
In fact now that I think about it the only jokes I’ve heard about the opioid crisis have basically amounted to “lol white people are dying and they deserve it” despite the fact that this shit is killing everyone. So-called journalists have written about it with the same sentiment — white people didn’t have compassion during the crack epidemic and they don’t deserve any now.
That’s a pretty good example of popular media using racial antagonism to divide & conquer the working class.
Some of the most vocal critics of the DNC are coming from the left. [1] They’re a center-right party masquerading as left-wing opposition. They have no interest in helping working folks and every interest in making sure corporations are as powerful as they can be. A lot of folks who previously drank the DNC koolaid are realizing how bad it is with how the democratic administration has tried to gaslight us about Covid this holiday season.
This exactly. They use progressive language to create this image for themselves and their role is only to serve as controlled opposition and prevent any challenge to the current economic order from occurring.
Being a Democrat these days is like being in a “union” that your bosses set up just to try and convince you that you had representation when they were deciding what you were going to “win” from “organizing” ahead of time.
This is why I dislike propaganda aimed at supporting them in television etc. No matter how nice the individual thing sounds, it serves to reinforce this institution who’s only mission in life is to fuck you over and continue extracting wealth from you and your family.
I think black actors is the least woke thing of concern compared to others.
I watched half a first episode and the amount of ideological conditioning is comparable only to the old soviet movie I've watched.
The whole plot is based on "good natured people who are different are unjustly considered monsters because of prejudice, and have to do bad things because of it", and they'll make sure to mention this injustice every 2 minutes or so.
When it's not about "bigotry", it's about girls proving they are "strong independent women" by dressing boys etc...
Maybe the authors find a way to turn it all on its head, but considering the naiive seriousness in which all this is delivered, I don't think so.
From what I've seen, all this series is for people who are still amused by all the "antiestablishment" trope
Many of the characters have been changed (in personality/storyline and in ethnicity) from the books and from the games. For example Yennefer is no longer a mature, smart person but now is a stereotypical "I'm a strong independent woman" character that has the personality of a 15 year old. Triss is completely different from the books and game. Fringilla magically changed to be black even though EVERY other Nilfgaardian is white. Side characters were changed to be black but still act as if they come from the same background as their original book characters. This doesn't make sense in a medieval Eastern Europe type environment.
This is what I mean by shoehorned in. HBO Rome did a great job of integrating racial diversity in a plausible way that made sense in the context of the story. Egypt/North Africa historically had Numidians in major leadership roles. The Witcher does not bother to write a story that makes sense with the replaced characters.
Again, I'm not white and even I can notice these changes.
> characters have been changed ... Yennefer is no longer a mature, smart person but now is a stereotypical "I'm a strong independent woman" character that has the personality of a 15 year old. Triss is completely different from the books and game
That doesn't sound like wokeness, it sounds like a character change that you just don't like. Fair enough, but it's not wokeness.
> Fringilla magically changed to be black even though EVERY other Nilfgaardian is white. Side characters were changed to be black
I just finished watching this series. Some actors have dark skin but it's not part of their character or even mentioned. There's no reference to any sort of Black culture or even nation in-universe where people tend darker. There's no sense in which they are black except for the literal colour of their skin. And at that level, there's no sense in which the characters in the books aren't black. There's no "changed to be black" here.
I assumed you had some objection about the actual storyline which does in fact revolve around discrimination against Witchers, racism and genocide and slavery against Elves, culture wars between nations, and cultures domineering others through centuries of abuse and slavery. But really you're just annoyed that some actors are black?
> There's no sense in which they are black except for the literal colour of their skin
That's the _point_. The writing is completely unrelated to the actors being black. They were casted as black people because the writers/producers wanted black people for the sake of having black people on screen. If there was reference to black culture or some sort of backstory then it would be a _justified casting_ and I wouldn't be complaining.
You don't cast a British person as a Hispanic character in Narcos. Why are random characters in the Witcher magically changed to be black when there's no story reason for them to be black?
> I assumed you had some objection about the actual storyline which does in fact revolve around discrimination against Witchers, racism and genocide and slavery against Elves, culture wars between nations, and cultures domineering others through centuries of abuse and slavery
I actually think the Witcher does a great job at showing the effects of discrimination and racial conflict in this sense.
> You don't cast a British person as a Hispanic character in Narcos
But they aren't British nor Hispanic. They're Nilfgaardian and Elves. If you have some idea in your head about what that means for skin colour, it's clearly not the same idea that the writers do.
Right, but the show casts all other Nilfgaardians and elves as white people. If the show casted all Nilfgaardians as black people or gave a story reason for a mixed composition then it would be compelling. But they don't. That's why Fringilla's casting seems shoehorned in.
Maybe there's a recessive gene that causes some tone difference. Maybe there's some historical war that caused the blahblahblah migration of the whoseits to the whatsits. Or maybe it's not part of the story at all and doesn't need to be.
When I meet a new black person they don't spend a bunch of time explaining to me why they're black. That would be pretty weird. It sounds like you have some real hangups about race that just isn't shared by the writers.
> Maybe there's a recessive gene that causes some tone difference. Maybe there's some historical war that caused the blahblahblah migration of the whoseits to the whatsits.
I'm not saying the black character is supposed to explain why they're black. I'm saying the writers should have written some reason into the story for why out of all the Nilfgaardians, Fringilla is the only one that's black. The black character doesn't need to be the one explaining it. Otherwise it seems like a poor casting choice because it doesn't make sense within the story. Which makes it seem shoehorned.
> Maybe there's some historical war that caused the blahblahblah migration of the whoseits to the whatsits
And that would have been great backstory to flesh out the universe...
> It sounds like you have some real hangups about race that just isn't shared by the writers.
It sounds like you don't feel like one character that has a different ethnicity than their entire fantasy race seems out of place. If in Black Panther there was a singular white main character and everyone else in Wakanda was black would you feel the same way?
What if she was just the person who auditioned best for the role? Why are you assuming her blackness means she must have been shoehorned into the role? I see no valid reason why her blackness should have to be explained to anyone.
Okay, so if Jason Momoa was the one who auditioned best for T'Challah you would say that's a good casting? Because I would say having the supposed leader of a kingdom of black people look completely different from all the people in that kingdom is really poor casting.
> Why are you assuming her blackness means she must have been shoehorned into the role?
Perhaps because every other Nilfgaardian is white. If Nilfgaardians were a mixture then it would be a good casting. Just like if all Nilfgaardians were black then casting a white person as Fringilla would also be garbage casting.
You are free to assume in your fantasy world that outside appearance has no impact on story telling in a TV show but I and many others in the Witcher fanbase have opinions to the contrary.
> Okay, so if Jason Momoa was the one who auditioned best for T'Challah you would say that's a good casting?
I would say Black Panther is a story about blackness. The blackness of the main character is kind of the point of the whole thing, it’s even in the title. This is not true for the Nilfgaardians. There is no race component here to that story, so why does race need to be explained? Why don’t any other characters have to explain what makes them unique from the rest?
There is a parallel here I would like to draw. Growing up my class was all white, except one black kid. In a whole school of almost 1000 kids. I noticed he had to justify his existence a lot. People would ask him why he was there — as if he was lost or something. He was there because he lived in our community, and that’s really all there is to it. Nevertheless he had to have a reason to be at the school, while none of us did. It wasn’t enough for him to just exist.
> Why don’t any other characters have to explain what makes them unique from the rest
They do. Geralt has a huge back story that explains why he's ripped and has a bunch of scars and why every peasant is afraid of him. Yennefer has a huge back story that explains why she's beautiful. If they casted someone ugly as Yennefer then that backstory wouldn't exactly apply anymore would it?
> I would say Black Panther is a story about blackness
Let's use another example then. Narcos - if some Asian guy was the one who auditioned best as Pablo Escobar, would you think that's good casting? Narcos is clearly not about Colombian culture, it's about the War on Drugs. If all the random cartel members are casted as Latino but the leader is Asian you think that's good casting? Or if we look at House of Cards - what if you replaced Garret Walker with a Korean dude. You think that's good casting?
> why does race need to be explained
Because one character is different from all the other people in their supposed race (Nilfgaardian). If there was a character that was taller than everyone in their kingdom I'd expect that to be explained too. Or if the character was white and everyone else was not.
> Growing up my class was all white, except one black kid
That's great, but completely irrelevant in this case. You are trying to impose your own social justice values on a high fantasy TV show. Ironically I find it's always white dudes in their 20s and 30s that have this view of the world. I bet you're white, male, a millennial or Gen Z, you live in a big city, and you work in tech.
> Geralt has a huge back story that explains why he's ripped and has a bunch of scars and why every peasant is afraid of him.
And is that strength relevant to the story, or is it apropos of nothing? Yennefer's beauty has no context in the story? Of course it does - these qualities bring these characters power that shapes the events as they unfold. Fringilla does not derive her power from her blackness because it's not relevant to her character's story. It doesn't need to be explained because it doesn't advance the story.
The very simple explanation is: she's fantastic and terrifying in the role, and that's why she has the part. The exact pigmentation of the actress' skin doesn't need to be explained in the story, no matter the skin pigmentation of her co-stars.
> You think that's good casting?
I mean, maybe it's just my bad taste, but I see nothing wrong with any of your suggestions. But I haven't seen either of those programs so I can't really give a good answer. Is Garret Walker anti-Korean? Is that why it would be a bad decision?
> If there was a character that was taller than everyone in their kingdom I'd expect that to be explained too.
Why? Some people are just taller than others. The explanation is: that guy is taller. We don't know why, he just is. We all grew to this height, and he just kept growing until he got to that height. The same thing goes for skin tone. For all you know this is a sampling issue. We're talking about a fantasy race here. If you really want some sort of satisfactory explanation, go write some fanfiction.
> You are trying to impose your own social justice values on a high fantasy TV show.
No, I'm actually projecting the experience of my youth onto this situation right now. I'm not trying to impose my view on anything -- quite the opposite; I'm saying things are fine the way they are.
I'm actually going to bookmark this conversation as a discussion piece because there's a lot to unpack here, you've been very candid.
> I bet you're white, male, a millennial or Gen Z, you live in a big city, and you work in tech.
Right on 3, wrong on 2 - I'll let you guess which!
> I'm actually going to bookmark this conversation as a discussion piece because there's a lot to unpack here, you've been very candid.
Funny, you've got the same attitude of condescending moral superiority as the demographics I mentioned too. You act as if you speak for all people of color (as a white person), who need to be defended by you, the savior. You probably consciously think you're just trying to help. Unfortunately you're not the first person of this type I've encountered on HN.
If you want to address my specific points that's fine, but turning instead to attack me through your perception of my skin color is a different conversation entirely, one that I'm not interested in having.
Maybe the fantasy world of the Witcher is less racially divided than our world (and also seemingly how you see the world too). Why does it need to be that the nilfgaardians have to be one skin color? Why can’t they be multicultural like the US?
>You don't cast a British person as a Hispanic character in Narcos.
YYou realize in Narcos they cast a Brazilian actor to play Pablo Escobar a famous Columbian. The actor had to literally learn Spanish for the role and despite his best spoke with an obvious Brazilian accent. Besides Pablo, numerous other characters were played by actors who, while native Spanish speakers are not from Columbia and you can tell by their accent. You literally couldn't have picked a worse example to make your point.A
> The writing is completely unrelated to the actors being black.
It is just as unrelated to them being White where the actors chosen are White. “Black needs justification but White doesn't” is a recipe (long followed, btw) for White favoritism in casting.
Double pay is quite common over the holidays for any hourly role. Flight attendants are unionized so they're far from making minimum wage. This article is really not news, every decent company pays double time over the holidays.
> Texas-based Christus Health early this year said on its website it planned to defy the rules because its comprehensive list of prices “will only be useful for our competitors.”
Because publishing prices leads to actual competition.
Price transparency in medical care should have been a thing since the 80s when we deregulated telecomms and aviation. There should be price transparency and WYSIWYG billing, no hidden fees, or bait and switch, etc. No $50 tylenols and such shenanigans.
I’d take it a step further and mandate a single price for everybody. Let insurance cover whatever the actual is going to be for paying in cash and not some voodoo accounting that generates a cash price backwards from the maximum negotiated rates.
Insurance should be to cover unforeseen events. Baking in the cost of trivial things like a “fee flu shot” just acts as a way to obscure the true costs.
Let's take it one step further and everyone pays for health insurance out of their taxes according to their means, and the state handles all the billing, negotiation and pricing on their end - and the individual never has to care who's paying and how much. Socialized medicine already covers 40% of Americans between Medicare, Medicaid and the VA. Time to get it to 100%.
The Canada Health Act is a great model. The Feds mandate that the Provinces figure out how to provide everyone a minimum standard of care, and each Province administers a public health insurance program that covers everyone. This would map perfectly to the states.
I'm not sure I would want to go there. "People of means" already pay greater taxes which support government programs. If you think they are not paying enough, raise their taxes, but avoid double taxation.
In other words, I don't think just because I would pay $1000 for a broken arm means I would agree that Bezos should pay $100,000,000 for the same. It would make no sense. It would make sense to close his tax loopholes. Sure.
Sorry for the unintentionally charged and hence confusing language there. I just meant via progressive taxation. Something like the Ontario Health Premium [1] which ranges from $0 per year if your taxable income is $20,000 or less, to $900 per year if your taxable income is more than $200,600.
I agree and also do not want what you outlined! :)
I strongly suspect that a socialized medical program in the US would not actually cost individuals any more than they're paying now - it's just that the cost they're paying is hidden behind employer paid premiums. That's just a private tax.
> Medicare already is 1/3 of the federal budget and I can assure you someone making low 6 figures definitely pays more in tax than 3x $900.
Well the first step is redirecting all the premiums paid by employers on behalf of employees into the federal pot. That should net ~$5500 per taxpayer or an additional ~$1.8T per year. That will sort out the bulk of it with no additional cost visible to individuals.
That is not the plan put forth by Medicare for All advocates. There is a strong undertone of income redistribution in progressive proposals for single payer.
I would also expect that if the government was taking that money my health benefits would be at least as good as they are now. And I don't think that will be the case. When I was a kid there was a period where I was on California MediCal and I distinctly remember getting glasses with _super_ thick lenses because all MediCal would pay for was the cheapest frames and lenses.
> That is not the plan put forth by Medicare for All advocates.
I'm almost 100% confident it is. That money is currently being paid on behalf of individuals to insurers. Take the insurers away that money either goes to individuals and gets taxed, or gets sent directly to the feds. Either way it's a no-op.
> There is a strong undertone of income redistribution in progressive proposals for single payer.
Healthcare is the great equalizer. It's not insurance - everyone needs it and everyone will use it. There's not really a strong correlation between more spend and better outcomes past a certain point. Except in the rarest of cases you can't cure cancer with fat stacks. What offering healthcare does is give low income folks the opportunity to found companies without the fear of death. It dramatically reduces the burden on all businesses and especially small businesses by killing a massive cost center.
> I would also expect that if the government was taking that money my health benefits would be at least as good as they are now. And I don't think that will be the case.
Every healthcare system that ranks above America's is single payer or two-tier socialized. MediCal is set up to be punitive to the poors like all Medicaid programs. A Medicare system isn't. There's a reason not a single AARP member is advocating for eliminating Medicare. What getting everyone on the system does is it makes the political class beholden to the needs of the individuals.
I watched Donald Trump in front a group of older folks literally hug a flag and say he'd do whatever it took to keep the Democrats away from their Medicare. That doesn't sound like a system itching to be upturned does it?
Socialized medicine is no more a partisan issue in most countries than a socialized fire department or sidewalks.
By income redistribution I mean most progressive proposals aim to heavily tax high earners to fund healthcare for lower income individuals. That money would otherwise be used by those earners to buy their first home, build retirement wealth, etc. Ever heard of HENRYs?
> MediCal is set up to be punitive to the poors like all Medicaid programs. A Medicare system isn't.
Citation is needed here. A lot of good doctors in my area won't take Medicare patients because Medicare reimbursements are too low. We also know from European systems that because everything is triaged based on need that wait times end up being very long if you don't have a life threatening condition. You also need to consider that American doctors make substantially more than European ones. If you compare the pay of specialty doctors in the NHS to ones in the US the difference is something like 5x.
> What getting everyone on the system does is it makes the political class beholden to the needs of the individuals
That is your perspective, and I think it's a naive one. I think it would prevent reforms that drive efficiency. Think of what happens when anyone talks about making Medicare more efficient: they get attacked as anti-elderly and portrayed as wanting to cut benefits. Or the same for military spending. At least the free market (which healthcare is not right now, but it could be) is ruthless about creating efficiency.
> Socialized medicine is no more a partisan issue in most countries than a socialized fire department or sidewalks.
Funny that the UK argues about NHS funding a lot then.
> By income redistribution I mean most progressive proposals aim to heavily tax high earners to fund healthcare for lower income individuals.
As someone who would be on the giving end of that, I'm fine with it, honestly. I won't always be on top.
> We also know from European systems that because everything is triaged based on need that wait times end up being very long if you don't have a life threatening condition.
We don't know that at all. Triaging based on need is a feature, not a bug - and a super easy way to save a ton of money! All of these criticisms were made up by the marketing department at insurers to fleece Americans. That's not hyperbole, and don't take my word for it. Here's an interview with one of the Cigna guys admitting to doing it, and apologizing. [1]
"Here's the truth. Our industry PR and lobbying group, AHIP, supplied my colleagues and me with cherry-picked data and anecdotes to make people think Canadians wait endlessly for their care. It's a lie. And I'll always regret the disservice I did to folks on both sides of the border"
> You also need to consider that American doctors make substantially more than European ones. If you compare the pay of specialty doctors in the NHS to ones in the US the difference is something like 5x.
Ok, and they shouldn't. I'm sorry. It's not sustainable, it's not affordable. They're taking pay cuts. Nobody is entitled to a certain salary, standard or lifestyle in perpetuity no matter how unsustainable. BMWs for doctors while 10% of Americans are told to die or pick their favorite finger after an accent is unconscionable. America pays more than anyone else anyways, and would still after cuts, where would they go?
However, this is also simply not true for every system. Most similar countries socialize malpractice insurance which is a huge cost for US doctors. US OBGYNs pay up to $200,000 per year in malpractice insurance. In Canada, $40,000CAD. In the UK I think it's 0GBP handled by the CNST. That goes a long way to balancing out pay differentials.
In the US anesthesiologists make 400K USD median, in Canada 335K CAD median.
> Funny that the UK argues about NHS funding a lot then.
They argue about funding and prioritization and all sorts of stuff, sure, but it's not a partisan matter that the NHS should exist and be the status quo. The NHS was literally in the opening ceremonies of the 2012 olympics. 87% of British folks are proud of the NHS. [2]
Canada's Conservatives support single-payer medicine too.
> As someone who would be on the giving end of that, I'm fine with it, honestly. I won't always be on top.
And I and many others are not. You should recognize that this is a _political_ issue where there is no objectively better outcome. Higher taxation has long run drags on innovation and wealth building. The tradeoff is yes, we don't have universal healthcare. I'm okay with that if it means I have more job opportunities and ability to build my wealth.
> In the US anesthesiologists make 400K USD median, in Canada 335K CAD median
Just because the gap isn't 5x doesn't mean there still isn't a huge gap. $335K CAD is $235K USD. And Canada has comparable CoL to major US cities so you're losing real purchasing power there.
> That's not hyperbole, and don't take my word for it
Take a look for yourself at the data in Table 4 [1] sourced directly from each country's government reporting infrastructure and decide for yourself whether you would accept those wait times. I wouldn't accept a 2 month average wait time for something as simple as cataract removal, that's for sure. The quality of life loss in that time is immense.
> Ok, and they shouldn't. I'm sorry. It's not sustainable, it's not affordable. They're taking pay cuts.
Good luck passing any legislation over the lobbying of the AMA then. You're suggesting fundamentally untenable legislation that will never pass in the US. Aka bikeshedding. This is exactly the reason progressives can't get any legislation passed in Congress.
> And I and many others are not. You should recognize that this is a _political_ issue where there is no objectively better outcome
Luckily the rich are a minority and this is a majority rule system :)
There is 100% an objectively better outcome. Better care for more people, fewer people falling through the cracks is objectively better. There are objective rankings of healthcare system quality.
> Higher taxation has long run drags on innovation and wealth building.
And not dying if a small business owner gets sick has a long run boost to the economy. Individuals being able to take risks without fear of death and pestilence has a long run boost to the economy. A carpenter having all their fingers re-attached instead of just some of them has a long-run boost to the economy. Small and mid-size businesses not having to administer health plans is a boost to the economy.
> I'm okay with that if it means I have more job opportunities and ability to build my wealth.
You'll still have your chance lol.
> I wouldn't accept a 2 month average wait time for something as simple as cataract removal, that's for sure.
Cataracts develops slowly over a period of years. It's explicitly one of the lowest priority surgeries you can get for that reason. It took you 10 years to develop you don't need it out by Monday, late February is fine. (NOTE: In some provinces your data shows you can get it out in 2 days in Canada). It's nuts to think that you should be able to pay more to get your decades old cataract out by Monday so that someone who was in a car accident can get in line lol.
So yeah you absolutely would, and you wouldn't care at all.
Either way, America will almost certainly land on a two-tier system where you can still get your way.
> The quality of life loss in that time is immense. This is exactly the reason progressives can't get any legislation passed in Congress.
It's simply not. Sorry. Data and satisfaction surveys disagree, but also - only for the few who can afford to jump the queue. There's very few of those so they're not really represented in surveys.
> Good luck passing any legislation over the lobbying of the AMA then.
Single payer in Canada passed explicitly against the wishes of the entire North American medical establishment. "The organized medical establishment was not nearly so reticent and mounted a ferocious propaganda campaign fronted by the local College of Physicians and Surgeons with the support of the Canadian Medical Association (CMA), the AMA, the local economic elite and most of the media in the province." [1]
> Luckily the rich are a minority and this is a majority rule system
Hmm, is that why the Build Back Better Act got killed in part by House Democrats wanting a SALT cap repeal? "The rich" you're thinking of excludes a large percentage of high earners who live in high CoL areas but are not wealthy. I'll remind you 20% of California earns more than $162k [1]. That's a lot considering the win margin of the general election and most CA state propositions. Enough to tip elections.
> And not dying if a small business owner gets sick has a long run boost to the economy
"Small business owner dying because they got sick without insurance" just doesn't happen. This is a strawman.
> You'll still have your chance lol
Average house price in Frankfurt is 7200 euro/sqm [2]. Tell me again how you can pay for a 200sqm house (=1.4M euro) when European software engineers make less than half of what American engineers make and get taxed more? A new grad at Uber in Europe makes 87k EUR [3]. A new grad in the US at any big name tech company makes more in the range of $180-200k. So your pay is more than double and you get taxed less, meaning you build wealth in the range of 3x as quickly.
> Hmm, is that why the Build Back Better Act got killed in part by House Democrats wanting a SALT cap repeal?
This could not be less relevant, but yes, I do think this likely represented the majority position. I think as much as we grumble Manchin represents his people. By the way 70% of Americans support Medicare for All so I'm not really worried about the popularity of the position. [1]
> "Small business owner dying because they got sick without insurance" just doesn't happen. This is a strawman.
18,000 Americans die each year due to insufficient medical coverage. You willing to bet not a single one is a small business owner? [2]
> Average house price in Frankfurt is 7200 euro/sqm [2]. Tell me again how you can pay for a 200sqm house (=1.4M euro) when European software engineers make less than half of what American engineers make and get taxed more?
Speaking of straw men, this is all attributable to the fact the Germans manage to cover 100% of their population for $5,595 per capita, vs America's covering 40% via a socialized program and 60% via private cover for $11,000 per capita?
> A new grad in the US at any big name tech company makes more in the range of $180-200k. So your pay is more than double and you get taxed less, meaning you build wealth in the range of 3x as quickly.
This argument doesn't hold water. You won't get that salary, broadly speaking, unless you live in SF, NY or SEA. There, your cost of living is so high your net take-home pay may well be lower than the German engineer. Certainly not after you adjust for PPP. But of course this has nothing to do with healthcare.
At this point much of your argument has devolved into Gish gallop, so let's take a step back.
If private cover is so good - so clearly superior - would you advocate for eliminating Medicare and Medicaid? If not, why not? Why is socialized medicine the bees knees once you turn 65 but utterly unworkable if you're younger? Why do 75% of those covered by Medicare think the system is working very well - significantly more than those with private cover - and why would that not extend to everyone?
My argument is simple: Medicare for All entails higher taxes on high earners, which stunts wealth building and economic mobility, especially for high earners who grew up in poverty. This can be easily seen by comparing, for example, salaries of software engineers in Europe and the United States. Medicare and Medicaid are intended to take care of those that _can't work_, but Medicare for All is intended to take care of people that _choose not to work in a higher paying field they dislike_.
> private cover is so good
I would pay for a single payer option if everyone paid a flat fee for insurance that wasn't income based. I'm against the income redistribution part of Medicare for All, for aforementioned reasons.
> Why do 75% of those covered by Medicare think the system is working very well
Once again, polls are incredibly misleading and dependent on the wording used in the survey. You need only look at surveys of Obamacare vs. the ACA to see this effect.
You continually try to engage in asking the same questions by claiming to not understand all the statistics I've given you and I don't believe you're conversing in good faith anymore. Goodbye.
> My argument is simple: Medicare for All entails higher taxes on high earners, which stunts wealth building and economic mobility, especially for high earners who grew up in poverty.
This is an absolutely tiny fraction because most poor people can't afford the healthcare necessary to actually thrive in the economy. Ditto the education. What we need is equality of opportunity, and that requires social services.
> I'm against the income redistribution part of Medicare for All, for aforementioned reasons.
I'm completely uninterested in this. Unless tied to income it's a regressive tax that punishes the poor disproportionately along the axis of marginal utility of money.
> Once again, polls are incredibly misleading and dependent on the wording used in the survey. You need only look at surveys of Obamacare vs. the ACA to see this effect.
This is a different subject and so not relevant. Everyone knows what Medicare is. The only thing most right-wingers know about Obamacare is that Obama created Obamacare. Really it's more like Romneycare for All as it's essentially a Republican policy. There's not a single left-leaning thing about making every individual pay a private company for healthcare. You're not showing a skew in reality, just marketing.
I suspect Americans would feel differently if they knew that Obamacare single handedly dropped the rate of people dying from lack of cover by almost 50% per annum.
> You continually try to engage in asking the same questions by claiming to not understand all the statistics I've given you and I don't believe you're conversing in good faith anymore. Goodbye.
Respectfully disagree. I've successfully refuted every concrete point you've made up to and including whether "the left can pass such a bill" and whether you really need cataract surgery tomorrow.
I wish you the best. Medicare for all is coming. It's just a matter of time.
However, you have failed to answer my core question. Do you think that Medicare should be abolished? Should Medicaid? If so, why? And in what concrete ways do you think that would make America a better place? More efficient? And why is 65 the magic age at which "socialism" finally starts to make sense?
According to your profile, you're not even a U.S. citizen, how can you purport to understand anything in the U.S. when you don't vote here? When you repeatedly post in favor of one political slant as a foreign national that's no different from Russian troll farms getting paid 50 cents a post to spam politics online.
> I'm completely uninterested in this. Unless tied to income it's a regressive tax that punishes the poor disproportionately along the axis of marginal utility of money.
Nobody asked your opinion. I was simply stating mine.
> However, you have failed to answer my core question
I don't feel a need to prove to you I've answered anything. Like I said, you are conversing in bad faith.
> Medicare for all is coming
Is that why Democrats lost elections in swing states in 2021 by double digit shifts compared to 2020?
It shows you that the "rich" you're discounting wield substantial political influence. Manchin wasn't the only one that killed the bill, House democrats also said they'd kill the bill during the merging of Senate/House versions if there wasn't a SALT repeal.
> By the way 70% of Americans support Medicare for All so I'm not really worried about the popularity of the position
Do you know how these surveys work? They literally just ask people how much they support "Medicare for All". They don't present any concrete policy or implications of implementing M4A. That's why "Obamacare" got way less support than "Affordable Care Act" in polls. Please understand the stats you're quoting at the very least.
> 26,000 Americans die each year due to insufficient medical coverage. You willing to bet not a single one is a small business owner?
And hundreds of thousands of people die from benign illnesses like the common cold and the flu each year. What's your point? I bet we can find someone in Germany who died because of wait times too, that doesn't mean we can use that to generalize to everyone.
> Speaking of straw men, this is all attributable to the fact the Germans manage to cover 100% of their population for $5,595 per capita, vs America's covering 40% via a socialized program and 60% via private cover for $11,000 per capita?
This has no relation to the impact of universal healthcare's higher taxes on wealth building. It is a fact that it is harder for working professionals in Europe to build wealth compared to the US.
> This argument doesn't hold water
Cost of living is not so high in NY and SEA. You can rent a luxury apartment in SEA for less than $2000/mo, which is comparable to Frankfurt. Only SF is insane. And German cost of goods is around the same or more than US, so I don't know where you're going with your PPP idea. You need only look at the cost of electronics, gasoline, food, etc. to see they are about the same.
> But of course this has nothing to do with healthcare
Yes it does. Implementing M4A would require heavily taxing high earners. I'm giving you an example of how a high earner would be unable to build wealth under European-like taxation. But it seems like you are unable to understand the idea that high taxes unfairly penalize high earners who came from poor families. I.e. implementing M4A's taxes would penalize economic mobility. Perhaps you came from a family with wealth already.
> By income redistribution I mean most progressive proposals aim to heavily tax high earners to fund healthcare for lower income individuals. That money would otherwise be used by those earners to buy their first home, build retirement wealth, etc.
This is the most transparently selfish thing I've read in a while. Congratulations.
”Socialized medicine is no more a partisan issue in most countries than a socialized fire department or sidewalks.”
That’s a disingenuous statement since most countries have a mix of public and private care and many folks rely on private insurance and private care. Canada is one where private care is almost non-existent, but the UK, Switzerland, Australia have a significant private segment.
What Medicare for All suggests (and a few Democrats have said it explicitly) is that private insurance would disappear.
So Socialized medicine isn’t a partisan issue in most countries, but neither is private medicine.
A few years ago, in Canada, we were paying $4500 per person - and everyone was covered.
The US was paying $5K public per person and $5K private per person.
Meaning - the US is already paying more per capita in public healthcare spending, than Canada, and for that price in Canada - everyone is covered.
This kind of means, the US could literally give all of its citizens 'Canadian Quality Universal Coverage' and literally save a few dollars in public spending, and wipe out the need for private spending.
So 'cost' and 'profit' are different things.
The US HC system is a giant elephant of inefficiency.
This is not a small thing:
'Healthcare' is a 'Pillar of American Decline'. I don't mean that America is falling apart, but rather, it's having less influence in the world.
50 years ago, you went to the Hospital because you were hurt. Now - it's all about aging people who are elderly who see the doctor 20x a year and it's why costs have skyrocketed. It's also when people are the least productive and less likely to be working with good insurance.
HC is a disaster that makes the US a 'much less attractive place to live' for one's entire life, unless one is rich - whereas that was not the case before.
It really needs to be sorted out.
The Media Left, by highlighting Woke issues, instead of things like outrageous healthcare, has completely lost their minds. MSNBC was calling Elon Musk 'racist and misogynist' for his completely benign comments about this giant tax bill. Instead of looking at inequality issues through economic lenses, they're committed to throwing around gender and racial slander. The HC system is a soft, easy target because there are unlimited stories of people getting huge bills, unfair pricing. But you won't see to many stories, because "Sponsored by Phizer".
> 50 years ago, you went to the Hospital because you were hurt. Now - it's all about aging people who are elderly who see the doctor 20x a year and it's why costs have skyrocketed. It's also when people are the least productive and less likely to be working with good insurance.
Literally 100% of the elderly in the US are already covered by the socialized medicine you seem to be advocating for. It's not optional.
Anyone who's had extensive dealings with the VA would be glad to share why they are not interested in single payer. Making that switch will not remove the incompetence, poor staffing lack of care, lack of accountability, and so forth.
Some sane standards need to be drafted and then enforced, hard and fast, before we start mandating how healthcare is paid for.
And anyone who has dealt with socialized medicine in the OECD will tell you the exact opposite :) Wholesale reform is needed, and that can certainly be part of the package. However, parceling it out is a great way to achieve absolutely nothing as evidenced by the current morass.
Interesting to look at the population from your link. The United States appears to be doing the best (LPI 2020 ranked 18) out of all the countries with population over 100 million. After Japan (ranked 19) the next closest are China (54) and Indonesia (57). I'm not sure what relevance this might have, I just found it interesting. The CEO rankings show a much different picture.
If I had to guess, one is weighting access to care differently than the other. America's system is good but not top tier if you can get it. It's really bad if you can't.
> and the individual never has to care who's paying and how much
But then nobody cares about how much the government is paying, and you end up with more and more taxes and inflation.
Taxes are increasing. Government debt and inflation are skyrocketing. Can't we put an end to it?
Also the government can't even build passenger rail without wasting absurd amounts of money and having "unexpected delays" in all projects. Why should we trust it to manage everyone's healthcare?
Because every comparable country that has a government-run healthcare system has somehow ends up with it being ~twice as efficient. I get that there's theory that says a private healthcare system should be better at keeping costs under control, but it's not borne out by the evidence.
"~twice as efficient" is a stretch. They might cost half the price, but they are not necessarily twice as efficient.
Medical treatments and equipments in the US are the best in the world (discounting super small countries). Americans have the highest life expectancy in the world (discounting homicides and transit deaths). Americans can get treatments fast while people in Canada or the UK have to wait for months because the government is rationing treatments.
And we should consider other reasons that explain the costs besides "private system inefficiency": American companies carry the world on medical innovation (so other countries are benefitting from the Free-Rider Problem, and Americans are paying for it). American regulation requires doctors to spend several more years in training than at other countries (in other countries the medical school is usually merged with undergrad). And, finally, Americans just earn more than people in other countries. GDP per capita is 60k in the US, 40k in other developed countries.
> Medical treatments and equipments in the US are the best in the world (discounting super small countries).
Not really. They're fine. In line with OECD. And further, America has a number of blemishes such as among the highest maternal mortality and infant rate in the entire OECD. [1]
...the U.S. ranks 33 out of 36 Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) nations. In 2018, while infant mortality reached an all-time low in the U.S., at 5.9 infant deaths per 1,000 live births, still more than 21,000 infants died. Compared to countries with a similar GDP, the U.S. infant mortality rate is much higher. France and the U.K., for example, have 3.8 deaths per 1,000 live births.
The only area the US really excels is in cancer 5-year survival rates - not because the mortality rate is lower, however, it's about the same as everywhere else. The US just biases towards earlier screenings that do not extend life or reduce mortality.
> Americans have the highest life expectancy in the world (discounting homicides and transit deaths).
Are you sure about that? It doesn't look like that on this chart. [2] Not to mention the US spends dramatically more to achieve that much lower life expectancy than anyone else does.
> Americans can get treatments fast while people in Canada or the UK have to wait for months because the government is rationing treatments.
This is a straight-up lie peddled by the US medical insurance industry. Here's an admission and an apology by a Cigna executive tasked with doing so. [3]
"Our industry PR and lobbying group, AHIP, supplied my colleagues and me with cherry-picked data and anecdotes to make people think Canadians wait endlessly for their care. It's a lie. And I'll always regret the disservice I did to folks on both sides of the border."
They pulled the same thing when Canada instituted single-payer healthcare in 1962. [4]
> American companies carry the world on medical innovation.
Not really. There are as many European as there are American medical companies in the top R&D spenders worldwide. That's before we factor in government expenditures worldwide.
> And, finally, Americans just earn more than people in other countries. GDP per capita is 60k in the US, 40k in other developed countries.
Now imagine what they could do with an extra $5K per person per year - the difference between what the US and Canadian medical systems cost per capita.
The infant mortality rate is based on extremely misleading statistics.
In the US, if a baby is born who can be saved but isn't, their death is reported in the neonatal mortality statistics. But in other countries it is more common for babies in these situations to be counted as miscarriages or stillbirths.
In the US, very low birth weight infants are considered to be alive (because, of course, they are), but in Canada, Germany, Australia, and other countries, a premature baby weighting less than 500g is considered to be already dead, even if it is breathing and has a heartbeat. So they don't have to add it to their infant mortality statistics when their healthcare system fails to save its life.
In fact, since the year 2000, of the 52 surviving babies who were born weighting less than 400g, 42 were born and saved in the US.
The 4th worst maternal mortality rate in the entire OECD too. That would be the mother dying during childbirth. [1] More than double Canada in 2018 and 10X New Zealand. [2] Without getting into your data re: infants (because I do not know enough to do so), I suspect this one's not as easy to hand-wave.
The results of the study carried out in [2] say:
The U.S. has a relative undersupply of maternity care providers, especially midwives, and lacks comprehensive postpartum supports.
American healthcare is acceptable if you can afford it and a death sentence if you can't.
What's really interesting is that 60% of people in general (including those already on it) say Medicare is working well for seniors - but when you drill down only to the people actually covered, that number jumps up to 75%. Same source. Seems like a marketing issue?
Unfortunately as one example Medicare Part D price negotiation has been blocked since 2003. When some drugs were moved to Part B, insurance companies were furious because it allowed price negotiation for those.
Despite this election season’s divisiveness, both major parties’ presidential candidates have embraced the idea of authorizing Medicare Part D to negotiate directly with drug companies to set prescription drug prices. The Medicare Modernization Act of 2003 (MMA), which established Medicare Part D, included a ban on such negotiation.
Apparently both sides of the aisle pander to voters with the idea they'll help with healthcare costs and then don't once safely elected to office.
The patient should pay the same, no matter who does it. Compensation of healthcare staff is an internal matter and frankly not relevant to the patient.
So should every healthcare provider organization throughout the country be required to charge the same price for a given procedure? Many US doctors still run solo practices, so there is no real difference between the company and the "staff". It seems reasonable that doctors with more experience and better skills should charge higher fees.
To read your sarcasm I'd have to know whether you have in fact gotten surgery by a more experienced doctor. It just depends on so many things. First, you can't be a surgeon for that long, you start losing your "pulso" like stillness of hand at around 50. Then there's the vibe the old doctor and the young doctor give you.
You must use your judgment to interpret it, but let me tell you a trope: the old doctor, sure, he's done this thousands of times, so it's no big deal for him. But he might be complacent, and plus he's been a surgeon for decades, these guys get worshipped by the rest of the hospital, it typically gets to their head. He might have long ago lost sight of needing to help people who lost sight, if he's not a virtuous guy he'll hustle you, 100%. And if he fucks up? 1 divided by 2000 is what percentage error rate, .05%? Assuming it's never happened before.
Whereas the young doctor is probably hungry for his first paycheck after a decade of getting into debt and memorizing stuff, his big chance to stop getting hazed, this won't be his first time really, he'll want to do an amazing job. He has no track record so if he screws up, it won't be automatic to get a second chance, it's high stakes, and he'll have that error hanging over him. He might be nervous though, so you have to keep that in mind. But much better hands, and he'll actually perform the surgery according to the original definition of "perfection" : he'll carry it out all the way through. Won't skip steps to save himself a couple of minutes at the expense of weeks of pain. He doesn't yet know what parts of the surgery he can get away with not doing, he just does the whole thing.
On the other hand, if the old doctor is humble and the young doctor is arrogant, it could be the other way around. You need to judge the vibe.
So the choice would be between glaucoma surgery according to the standard of care - or glaucoma surgery according to the standard of care.
Now we are getting somewhere! What if all this "choice" did nothing to improve patient outcomes or public health but entirely served to get more money out of your pocket?
Given “no hospitals have been penalized as of late December, according to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which is responsible for enforcing the rules,” this comes close to dereliction of duty by CMMS. That said, that hospital’s spokesperson said they will be in compliance by the New Year, so maybe this is just a work in progress.
The price transparency rules became effective on January 1st 2021. A change like this will always take time for everybody to implement. But, I agree. If CMMS doesn't penalize non-compliance hospitals will drag their feet indefinitely.
Have you ever tried to bike to work regularly? There are a huge number of problems, at least in American cities that aren't NYC:
- drivers don't give a crap about cyclists
- every time it rains everything you wear gets mud all over it
- no bike lanes in a lot of roads
- terrible public transit, either you sit next to people who smell like pee or the train comes every 30 mins or there are no bike racks or your bike is likely to get stolen if you leave it alone for 30 seconds
- if you need to pick something up on the way to or from work you basically need to wheel around your bike in the store because otherwise it's 100% getting stolen by some guys with an electric saw
- some American cities are very hilly, so any commute longer than 2-3 miles becomes very tiring
The last point is easily addressed by e-bikes. The rest is up to Americans to challenge by voting politicians who promise to make changes in those directions.
You don't need (unreliable, prone to out of distribution breakage) deep learning for this. Bin packing is a well known problem in optimization literature and there are established algorithms for solving it with bounds on distance to optimality.
But when it comes to actually controlling the putting of the boxes in the truck the way the bin packing algorithm wants, you need deep learning. In case the robot slips a bit, changing direction a bit, on someone's handkerchief on the floor or whatever.
There exist methods to guarantee robustness within a certain L_p ball on your parameters (in this case the box positions). I'm sure with only a few hundred boxes they would be tractable to solve to optimality.
The actual robotics part is definitely deep learning though.
If you can provide exact coordinates of every box, then yes, mostly* (including correct guesses of where the box can be grabbed without ripping it. Of course exact coordinates are required even when the box is moving. If it shifts when you're grabbing/lifting/putting it down, you still have complete the action correctly). Or to put it more in engineer wording: it's going to be far more robust to environment changes.
And I would argue that whilst the machine learning way is pretty complex it's still simpler than 3d motion planning of moving robot platforms. And one machine learning solution can adapt to many robots with just retraining, without redoing the formulas from scratch.
* technically on a moving robot platform it hasn't entirely been solved, but good enough solutions do exist.
Ah, right, image recognition for the boxes. But I don't think they would use it for moving the arm.
> And I would argue that whilst the machine learning way is pretty complex it's still simpler than 3d motion planning of moving robot platforms.
On what grounds do you think this? 3d motion planning isn't complex in these scenarios.
> And one machine learning solution can adapt to many robots with just retraining, without redoing the formulas from scratch.
You don't redo the formulas from scratch, you just plug in the specs of the robot and then you have it. Positioning and moving arm parts is a solved problem. Redoing machine learning for every arm seems much more cumbersome.
Because the purpose of investing one's money is to attempt to preserve wealth. Dumping a bunch of money into a domestic factory with way higher variable costs that are structurally never going to improve is a surefire way to lose money. In contrast housing prices literally only go up and NFTs have non-zero chance at not losing all your money, which is better than a commodity factory in the US.
I think we'll see more onshoring if robotics ever gets to the point where factories can be cheaply fully automated.
"structurally never going to improve" seems to overstate things. Working standards in India and China will eventually improve (China is already pricing itself out of the clothing market). The era of cheap overseas labor will eventually dry up.
I think the bigger problem is that you couldn't invest in such businesses even if you wanted to. Nobody is even bothering to start them. The US still has a lot of advantages - a looser regulatory environment than Europe, less subject to the whims of politics than China/Russia, the best research institutions in the world, and essentially infinite dollars. But all this is to produce a managerial elite that decides it's cheaper to just print money and buy stuff elsewhere.
I don't think cheap overseas labor will dry up for at least another 30-50 years. There is still all of Africa for factory owners to exploit and underpay. And most of Southeast Asia and parts of Central Asia.
> managerial elite that decides it's cheaper to just print money and buy stuff elsewhere
Hah, that doesn't even begin to touch the moronic stuff that gets taught in b-schools.
Only if you work in tech, and only if you're a software engineer or PM. It is straight up not possible to live in a reasonably safe area in SF on a salary less than $100k before tax. And the biggest reason is the toxic cost of living caused by refusal to build high density housing.
I know software engineers who went from living with roommates in a tiny apartment in SF to paying less for a penthouse in other big cities.
Not disagreeing, but I think it has more to do with not having kids. You can find a one bedroom on Craigslist in almost any neighborhood in SF for less than $2,000 a month. How much more do you need to survive as a single person? Another $2K a month? That puts you at $4k/month, or $48K a year, which most full-time jobs will pay.
Assuming healthy, no kids, and that the landlord agrees to rent you the place, which may be difficult if you’re a person of color or have a low salary.
A "safe" and not particularly conservative budgeting rule of thumb is to not spend more than a third of your take-home income on housing... so your numbers pretty much match up exactly with what GP said about <$100k salary.
True, but I’ve read that most people don’t budget or spend conservatively, so it is theoretically possible to get by on a normal paycheck in SF. At that rate you probably qualify for stuff like BMR housing and may be able to own a home in the Bay well before someone earning $100K-120K. However, it’s very unlikely you will win the BMR lottery or qualify for the loan.
Pre-COVID you couldn't find a 1br in a safe neighborhood for less than $3-3.5k. Less than 2k gets you something in the Tenderloin, which is the opposite of safe. Add food (~$700 because high cost of living), car payments (~$450 for an econobox), car insurance (~$200 because SF has a lot of break-ins and theft), health insurance, utilities (also expensive as fuck in NorCal due to cost of living), phone/internet bills, and you can realistically hit $5k/mo in expenses.
According to this calculator [1] post-tax a $100k salary nets you $5500/mo in San Francisco. This is mostly due to high state taxes. So you are basically living paycheck to paycheck despite making 6 figures and living a pretty standard life, which is moronic no matter how much you look at it.
I'm not sure what company you're at but there is certainly not a multi-year project in any I've worked at. There are long term _product_ roadmaps but in order to stay agile you never commit to something as big as a multi-year project. There are only individual features that get committed to. Even in core infra (heavily technical) where needs and solutions are known committed work goes out a year tops.
Absolutely you want people who delivered things from start to finish but I've never heard of those things taking multiple years. If it takes 2-3 years for your product to go to market it's a failure, regardless of whether it's an external or internal product.
This probably depends a lot on your industry. In my industry, every product I've worked on took multiple years to ship. It wouldn't be unreasonable to want to find sr engineers who had been through the whole cycle from early planning to post launch support.
Out of curiosity, what product does your company make? What kind of moat do they have if anything you do can be replicated in under a year by a competitor?
If a product takes 2-4 iterations to reach maturity, and a candidate is only involved in one of those iterations, they haven't participated in the complete multi-year product cycle from skateboard to scooter to bicycle to motorcycle to car, to borrow a popular metaphor.
If a roadmap goes out 3-5 years and a candidate only executes on one or two of those years, the candidate hasn't gained experience with which parts of a roadmap stay committed and which ones change in response to new information/priorities.
Most of this does not apply to a hot startup where the founders are still coding every day, but those aren't the only senior engineering opportunities.
My meta-experience is that the kinds of things I'm talking about tend to be most highly prized by companies that have been around longer than a startup, and now have problems to solve technically and organizationally that can most effectively be solved by people who have stayed in one company longer than one-two years.
Such companies aren't usually as exciting as pre-IPO startups, so absolutely no side-eye from me if anyone reading this is thinking "You can take that job and shove it, I'm busy inventing the future on a two-pizza team in a six-pizza startup."
are you not involved in the product roadmap and how that gets translated into the individual, smaller projects that get you there? then you may not be as senior as you think ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The latter is a negotiation tactic given in "Never Split the Difference". Essentially communicating over text/email allows you to carefully think about your words, whereas over a call or video call you can read tone of voice, body language, etc. and throw people off balance and reveal info.
I’ve seen recruiters “leak” a lot of “confidential” information from their clients saying “I’ve been asked not to share this but…”. I’ve always taken such messages with a pinch of cynicism but typically such messages are corresponded by phone where an audit trail is less more easily deniable.
So I definitely think phones are used because it allows the rules to be bent in a multitude of ways with a lower risk of consequence.
Plus it’s easier to pressure people when you’re on the phone than it is when they’re emailing.
Yes this. I see a lot of elaborate ideas about why recruiters prefer the phone, but it's simply playing to their strengths. It doesn't even need to be nefarious, everyone in the world plays to their own strengths in life.
The difference is that energy efficiency of CPUs has continued to improve exponentially fast, whereas we are already nearing asymptotic efficiency limits in things like fiber optics and know that we can't get exponential improvement.
A 1 kW server running for a day is peanuts in carbon cost compared to sending data to millions of people.
Look at the Witcher for an example. Or if you want to see this kind of shift happening over the course of a show, look at Madam Secretary. Season 1 didn't feature any of this crap and showed a strong woman main character that wasn't shoehorned in, by the last season everything was about "hurr durr let's ban guns and white men suck".
I'm not even white and I can notice the excellent storylines being ruined. It's like the writers don't know how to write a story with woke concepts that's actually strong so instead they shove it into every successful show until the show isn't successful anymore. HBO and Disney are going to eat their lunch at this rate with more compelling content.