I won't start ranting about it because I just get myself worked up, but quickly: I literally can not think of an investment of public funds that has a higher return than *cleaning the indoor air in schools*. It's so easy, so cheap, & has such HUGE payoff. Criminal that we basically don't do it.

Agreed! I’d dearly love to see US power generation become publicly owned. Places like Tennessee Valley have been that way for a long time & it’s been a huge boon to their region.

Unfortunately, I’m aware enough to know 🤮

Yup we discovered this as a nice side effect of having a pizza stone!

Christ, what an asshole he is.

Well, he’s still apparently doing anti-trans shit in the UK since then, so consider me confused 🤷🏻‍♂️

Graham Lineham? He’s Irish, and lives in Norwich, Norfolk, UK.

Same, very much same.

I mean, yes, he’s an ugly, pathetic bigot.

But it’s not Thanksgiving in the UK, it’s just Thursday 🤷🏻‍♂️

Many such cases, as the kids say. Plenty of swimming pools were filled in with concrete to avoid integration in the 60s/70s/80s. Boston bussing crisis, etc etc etc.

It’s almost entirely racism, classism, xenophobia, or all three.

Agreed.

Weird though: in Japan, their excellent trains are mostly private!

But I’d say that’s an exception due to history & culture, not an example to follow today.

We should have _more_ public hospitals and healthcare! We should have publicly funded healthcare, period, fuck private health insurance.

But these guys are just smashing things b/c they hate other people & hate other people “getting stuff”.

Meanwhile, we’re all worse off as a result.

That is a really small minority. Important, I’m sure! But 85% of hospitals being privately owned means this isn’t really about that.

It’s about devaluing certain professions & further reducing how much gov’t lifts up society, to the detriment of all (including these wealthy assholes).

Huh? US hospitals aren’t “fully funded by gov’t and donations”, nor are they federally owned, aside from VA hospitals.

Most are nonprofits, though they strain that definition at times.

Private equity has been buying up hospitals for a long time already, check the Stewart scandal in MA for example.

This is great to hear, I was trying to talk my wife into showing them to our 3-year-old!

Yup, that’s in the mix too! Hard to sell new cars to become used cars if you can’t even manufacture them.

What is there to privatize? Medicare & Medicaid? A whole lotta GOP voters (my dad included) will raise holy hell if Medicare gets the axe so I don’t see that working well for them.

Mostly, it’s downstream of fewer new cars being sold, which means fewer used cars being “created”. Throw in that car companies need new cars to sell and they’re more expensive than ever and you’ve got quite the mess!