Mastodawn

Sigrid Ellis Jan 20, 2023

My mom has been waiting at the emergency department for almost 12 hours now. Severe abdominal pain, uncontrolled vomiting. She's in the waiting room because there are no beds, no rooms. The waiting room is so crowded her friend had to go wait in the car.

When I was a kid NBC Nightly News used to run stories about the awful conditions in Soviet countries. Waiting in lines for toilet paper. Unexplained shortages in stores. Inability to get medications. Overcrowded emergency rooms.

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Sigrid Ellis Jan 20, 2023

The point was that the U.S. was better, that capitalism was better than communism, because we didn't have those conditions.

I think the upshot is that any country whose governance is trying to steal as much as possible from people and give it to massive corporations, criminals, and billionaires is going to produce conditions of overworked scarcity for the 99% of us who are not billionaires and corporate shills.

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ニルス・スキニール

@sigridellis
Aside from the fact that those lines were exaggerated, all societies are subject to shortages when resources and supply chains break down.
Russia had many shocks in 20th C, each 100 times greater than US COVID-19 shock. Russia has also been subject to many shortages over 300 yrs, attributed more to its abysmal climate and insanely long supply chains.