When they get sick, they’re numbers.
When you want to preserve your favorite industry, they’re conveniently and temporarily people.
It’s neat how they’re not numbers when you want to use them as human shields for a deeply immoral industry. They’ll be numbers again as soon as they get sick.
If people not going bankrupt and dying because of treatable illness bothers you personally because you have a financial stake in their exploitation, that’s your moral failure.
At a certain scale humans become numbers on a spreadsheet because that’s the only way to deal with them.
And it’s also a comfortable way to view them if your income requires denying them medical care.
(Some of the earliest “computers” in the US were built to handle the census more efficiently.)
Yes, IBM’s Hollerith Tabulators. Which were also used in the 40’s in Germany by people who were just doing their jobs as a vital part of the German economy. Can you believe people wanted to crash the roaring German economy in the 1940s?
If there were fewer of us it would help make us seem more human.
Reducing people to numbers is a great way to rationalize exploiting the sick and the dying. Which is what you’re doing.
I don’t operate the orphan crushing machine.
How many medical bankruptcies did the heroic men and women of the health insurance industry cause today? How many people are gonna die today because the infallable driver of the holy economy denied their treatment?
Are they even people to you? Or just feed stock for the machine?
Oh won’t someone think of the operators of the orphan-crushing machine.
The Epstein class wants to know which users are minors.
I don’t know any nazis, but I’ve never condoned nor would I ever condone them.
Sure. Let’s go with that.
Are you around a bunch of nazis? Where do you live?!
Not anymore. I left reddit. I don’t want lemmy becoming like reddit.
Hope you’re doing your part to make nazis feel unwelcome.
nazis are not welcome here.
I think an industry built on exploiting the sick and the dying should not exist. You’re the one saying that people are numbers so exploiting them is ok, as long as doing so employs erstwhile numbers who could work anywhere.
This wasn’t a problem when we decided that manufacturing jobs needed to go away. Or when mining jobs got outmoded. This wasn’t a problem when automation replaced workers. This wasn’t a problem when the gig economy turned jobs with benefits into contract work with none. This wasn’t a problem for decades while wages didn’t kept pace with inflation, by design. It’s not a problem until some reprehensible industry needs to go away for the good of humanity. Then it’s “Oh no think of the workers!”
As time progresses, the industry isn’t going to get smaller or less exploitative. It’s not going to have less money to buy politicians with, or fewer of the workers that can bask in the comfort of being the one group of workers you are willing to handwring about, at least until they can be replaced with AI. This problem will only become more intractable, killing more people and destroying more lives (sorry. numbers), increasing year on year, as it goes, if we let it persist like you’re arguing for.
There’s a cost, yes. But the status quo becoming worse and more entrenched will extract a greater cost over not a lot of time. I’d like to buy a better future for humans. You’re arguing in favor of spending more to rent a better future for corporations, with other people’s (again, numbers’) blood.