#public funding

[tenth-sentence]

Middle- and upper-class families were using contraception from the 1920s to control the size of their families but fear of working-class women's sexuality meant that it would not be until 1930 that the Ministry of Health allowed publicly funded nurses and doctors to give contraceptive advice to poor married women and then only on medical grounds.

"Normal Women: 900 Years of Making History" - Philippa Gregory

[nando161mando]

[eaglesnick]

101 Things You Should Know About the UK Tory Government

Thing 18

We all know the NHS is seriously under-funded, staff morale is at an all-time low, and there is an ever-increasing staffing crisis.  On top of that, delayed discharge patients are taking up over 13,000 of the 100,000 hospital beds. This has led to long delays in ambulance waiting times at A&E.

The alcohol swilling, cigar smoking, Therese Coffey when Health Secretary under Liz Truss, promised a £500 million emergency fund to help ease the A&E waiting times.

“At the moment, one of the key challenges is discharging patients from hospital into more appropriate care settings to free up beds and help improve ambulance response times. To tackle that, I can announce today that we are launching a £500m adult social care discharge fund for this winter.” (Therese Coffey: 22/09.22)

Steve Barclay is Rishi Sunak’s new Secretary of State for Health. When briefly appointed Health Secretary under the disgraced Boris Johnson, the editor of the Health Service Journal had this to say about him:

“A real nightmare, vindictive, arrogant, a bully, hostile to the NHS and all its works, a micro-manager of the wrong things “…never has a politician arrived in the post of health secretary trailing a worse reputation among NHS leaders”.

So far Barclay has done nothing to improve his negative reputation among health care professionals. The £500 million emergency fund promised by Coffey has yet to materialise.

“Hospitals and care homes have not received a single penny of a £500m emergency fund promised by the government to prevent the NHS becoming overwhelmed this winter."  (Guardian: 31/10/12)

In the meantime, ambulances continue to queue outside A&E; the sick languish on trolleys in hospital corridors; and patients continue to die before a doctor can see them.

[generalbytes]

Governments across the world are ploughing funds into the green agenda which involves electric vehicles.

[eelhound]

"The most basic problem is that the terms on which we meet our [online dating] partners, serious or otherwise, are increasingly being dictated arbitrarily and opaquely by corporate actors whose motivation is very different from that of users. We want love, they want money.

Don’t we want to understand how this crucial aspect of our experience is being shaped? And shouldn’t we have some say in how it’s shaped? If you think so, then we should work toward socializing the dating apps: bringing them under collective, democratic ownership.

What might that look like?

It doesn’t necessarily mean establishing a government-run National Dating Service or taking Tinder under state control. Digital platform scholar James Muldoon has argued that many digital platforms ought to be democratized and liberated from the profit motive, but what exactly this 'platform socialism' looks like will differ from platform to platform.

We could democratize dating through the creation of online dating co-ops, in which users and workers would collectively own and control their platforms. This approach would allow users to take control back from unaccountable investors and CEOs, while preserving the diversity of the dating-app ecosystem and avoiding unnecessary bureaucracy.

An app’s users and developers could become the app’s co-owners as well, with the size of one’s ownership share being adjusted, for example, to the length of time one has been a user or developer. These shares would entitle users to votes of a certain weight in making decisions about the app’s function and management. That would include important choices about what sort of information users provide in their profiles, for instance, and how the algorithm deals with ethically fraught preferences. Users could collectively deliberate about the possible impacts of different choices, from the perspectives of social justice as well as users’ individual well-being.

Each user-owner could pay a subscription fee to fund the app and pay its employees; users and developers could democratically decide how high to set the subscription fee, with the goal being not to maximize profits but to raise enough revenue to invest in creating the best possible dating experience.

Freed from the imperative to deliver value for shareholders, cooperatively run apps could do away with premium subscriptions, add-on purchases (like paying to 'boost' your profile’s visibility or paying for extra 'likes'), and annoying in-app advertisements. The co-ops could also institute collectively agreed-upon policies around privacy and data sharing; they would no longer need to exploit user data to sell to third-party companies.

But without the lure of lucrative profits drawing large investments, these dating cooperatives may find it hard to raise adequate funds from subscriptions alone. Here’s where the state would have an important role to play: in providing public funding for the development of cooperatively owned dating apps.

This idea isn’t as outlandish as it might seem: after all, even in the United States, governments already fund many cultural institutions for the benefit of their citizens’ quality of life: museums, the arts, research in the humanities, public parks, even nightlife. Dating apps are an increasingly important avenue for a central experience of being human. It makes sense for the government to devote public resources to them.

In fact, some countries are already paying to set up their own dating services. The Singaporean government’s Ministry of Social and Family Development has a webpage devoted to helping the uncoupled find partners; it advertises a government-run online dating portal, officially accredited dating agencies, and a 'Partnership Fund' which 'supports ideas and initiatives that you are passionate about to create opportunities to bring singles together.'

These government initiatives admittedly do have an ulterior motive — they’re trying to reverse sharply declining birth rates. Still, these programs show that there is nothing particularly strange or novel about publicly funded dating.

Corey Robin once wrote that 'the point of socialism is to convert hysterical misery into ordinary unhappiness.' That goes for socializing online dating, too. It wouldn’t do away with the frustration or disappointment that many people experience on the apps or in dating more generally. But it could be an important step toward making a dating experience that’s about people instead of profit. Then we could swipe, not to create wealth for the capitalist class, but for the simple and essential purpose of finding a date." - Nick French, from "Tinder Wants Money. We Want Love. The Solution: Socialize Dating Apps." Jacobin, 10 June 2022.

[royfmc]

Justice Department Warns Sheltered Workshops May Violate ADA

Segregating people with disabilities in employment and other day programs may violate their rights under the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Biden administration says. In a 13-page document released this week, the U.S. Department of Justice is outlining how the ADA’s so-called “integration mandate” applies to many daytime activities for people with disabilities. Much as the law requires…

[kp777]

Analysis of EU and US shows livestock farmers receive about 1,000 times more public funding than plant-based and cultivated meat

[undead-equality-league-official]

This blog is funded by your taxpayer dollars, golden coins, souls, tickets to hell, and roman denari. We thank you for your contributions and kindly remind you that immortality and/or undeath does not make you tax exempt.

[priyarocks23]

[totesmag]

The Future of Vaccines: Innovations and Developments

Brief overview of the topic Vaccines and immunization have been a crucial part of public health for centuries, playing a vital role in preventing the spread of infectious diseases and saving millions of lives. From smallpox to polio, vaccines have proven to be one of the most effective ways to protect individuals and communities from serious illnesses. Importance of vaccines and…

[balestrem]

Whenever people are so reluctant to help people with low income or poorer circumstances it’s as though they perceive poverty as a hell of one‘s own making. But is really isn’t. A child is not responsible for the fact that generations ago ancestors were suppressed or exploited nor is the child responsible for the parents debts. „Lower“ social classes are purposefully created by letting migrant workers take jobs that other people hate to do. Usually those jobs pay terribly and enforce an imbalance of power and income. This forces people into debt especially with the growing prices these days.

Furthermore, we act as though people with less money cannot get more money by the state than average or rich income people to make up for education etc. to provide a chance for a better future. Many people would describe it as unjust or unfair if poorer districts would receive more money. But when we look at disability, compensation is rarely an issue. With disability we understand that a form of compensation is required in order to better the circumstances for a person to live and participate in a humane manner. So why do people not apply this mindset to class? Why not see that poverty is disabling in a way and why not invest more money in structures which benefit poorer regions as a way to fund and support people to create a somewhat equal footing?

[brunhielda]

Gonna throw out something crazy. See what sticks. Maybe nothing, hopefully something:

In about 3 months, the US is getting a total solar eclipse. I am a Librarian at a Public Library hosting an event.

Now, I KNOW every corner of the globe has mythology on this very cool astrological event. Many with neat monsters/creatures to go with. It is difficult to find images of said creatures. Sometimes even difficult to find the mythology from various parts of the world. Almost impossible to find coloring pages.

I live in a tiny town, and I am doing everything I can to expand the horizons of the kiddos who live here, and they go bananas for a good story out loud, especially if they have something to do with their hands while listening, like pictures to color in.

I call on the artists of the internet. If you know of a myth about Solar Eclipse, please add on to this post. Tell me the basic myth, tell me the country/culture of origin, and please please please, add a cool picture I can turn into a coloring page. Artist names will be left on pictures for admirers to go look them up, and I hope artists see this as a fun challenge.

I don’t even know if Tumbler in English language has that much of an international presence but… 🤷🏻‍♀️ Here’s hoping.

[imkeepinit]

[hedgehog-moss]

French TV journalist having a hard time trying to get woman in the street to comment on Macron's latest speech yesterday

Protesters organised casserolades (aka banging on pots and pans) in front of city halls across the country at 8pm, when Macron was speaking, to symbolically drown out his voice. Later that evening, Macron was filmed singing a song with some 'random people' in a street in Paris, trying to show he can go out and meet people and have fun because protesters don't exist. The people he was singing with (members of a choir, some of whom are 'alt-right-leaning') were using a folk song app created by far-right activists that was criticised a few months ago for hosting a Spanish fascist anthem & Third Reich military marches.

The government's response was that the President "couldn't know the background of the people he met that night." Maybe if he wants to avoid being associated with the far-right (that's a big if, I know), Macron should keep in mind that with the kinds of strategies and positioning his government has adopted lately, people in the street who welcome him with open arms and are proud to be filmed with him have a higher than average likelihood of supporting fascism.

[communistkenobi]

I think the cost of journalism and publishing information being shuffled off onto the general public is a disastrous outcome for public education, and people pointing this out aren’t unaware that things cost money to produce lmfao. like what’s even the respectable lib position here, it’s better that every individual only has access to the exact services they pay a perpetual rental fee for? let’s just keep decentralising and deregulating, turn every aspect of our lives into a market good for purchase, I think we should do this with roads next. if you can’t pay the toll then complaining about it means you think road construction workers should be worked to death with no pay!