Get out of here with this Wolf Warrior jingoist bullshit. Your country was brutally suppressing a democratic movement in Hing Kong and Lai is only guilty of publishing books critical of the politburo. Which I might add is carrying out a genocide in Xianjang, illegally occupies Tibet, and mudrered perhaps thousands in and around Tiananmen Square in 1989. You'll note you can't even post on chinese social media anything containing both "Tiananmen Square" and "1989", and you call Lai a fascist... pathetic.
If you can't figure out how to use accumulated knowledge and advanced people skills by your late 30s, then maybe you weren't so rational or adaptable to new situations in the first place. Things may not click for me like they did when I was 25, but I usually see right away when I have relevant knowledge to solve a problem or when I know someone who can help.
GINA prohibits genetic discrimination in pricing common health care insurance, but not for products like life insurance, disability insurance, or even long-term care insurance. Some states have statutes that address the latter types of insurance, though.
Life insurance is mostly a useless financial product, and obviously the law wouldn't mandate selling life insurance to people who are likely to die early. That would create such a crazy perverse incentive.
They couldn’t realistically take on Walmart, Amazon, Target, Lowe’s, and major grocers all at once. They’re just not organized enough. We’ve already seen them give up or flop in court when challenged.
Tariffs are applied to the price the importer pays. Listing them separately would thus give away the reseller's markup. That's far more than the tariffs for most importers from China. Often you can look up the same item on Alibaba and find what the reseller is paying.
Graphite moderated reactors are broadly fine, the problem was with some technical specifics of that specific reactor design, and the operational culture that surrounded it. After Chernobyl, those flaws were corrected and operation of other RBMK reactors has continued to this very day, with no repeats.
Graphite reactors are not a good idea because they inherently have, well, graphite. That can burn.
The worst possible case for water-moderated reactors is uncontained meltdown. And it's not _terribly_ horrible. You will get contamination with volatiles, mainly cesium. But there's not a lot of it in the reactor, so it'll affect only a small area around the plant. Some fuel might get initially mobilized by steam explosions, but again, only a fraction.
The worst case for a graphite reactor is an uncontained core fire. That can burn for weeks and spread a significant part of the fuel as particulates over large territories (Chernobyl).
Is it likely? Nope. But there are black swan events: earthquakes, mega-hurricanes, meteorite strikes, Godzilla attacks.
As my comment implies, nearly everything else in Cuba is dysfunctional.
In one sense the Cuban healthcare system is mediocre, since it suffers from the shortages that plague the entire nation.
But that's like saying Cuban auto mechanics, who also suffer from shortages, are mediocre, despite their ability to keep the island's 70 year old American cars and Yugos in pristine condition.
What good is “healthcare” is you don’t have basics like antibiotics and wound dressings? The idea that Cuba healthcare is anything but terrible is a myth. Any stats coming from the Cuban government about health outcomes shouldn’t be taken seriously, they don’t allow any independent investigation and medical professionals can’t freely publish research.
That may well be true. While I have heard people praise the healthcare system, I neither am a doctor myself nor someone with first-hand experience of Cuban healthcare.
I personally knew someone growing up who goes there every year and did free eye procedures, and his commentary was that basic procedures were unavailable there and doctors lacked proper training. I know some other doctors who have interacted with them in Central America and expressed surprise at their lack of familiarity with basic procedures. You can’t learn those procedures without supplies.
The embargo doesn’t cover medical supplies and Cuban buys what medicine and medical supplies it has mainly from the US. The embargo also doesn’t cover food.
Cuba also does a lot of trade with China and Spain but has relatively little to actually sell because the state controlled industries are so unproductive. Cuba also has the least productive agricultural sector in the Caribbean, despite being the most productive before the revolution.
The embargo is no excuse it doesn’t cover other countries, and Cuba has always had European trade partners. In fact they received free oil, agricultural equipment, and technical support from the USSR, and later free oil from Venezuela until a few weeks ago.
Maybe, except for the tens of thousands who were eating US-supplied lead.
> The third, and perhaps most disastrous of our failures, was the decision to give stature and support to one of the most bloody and repressive dictatorships in the long history of Latin American repression. Fulgencio Batista murdered 20,000 Cubans in seven years - a greater proportion of the Cuban population than the proportion of Americans who died in both World Wars, and he turned Democratic Cuba into a complete police state - destroying every individual liberty.
- Remarks of Senator John F. Kennedy at Democratic Dinner, Cincinnati, Ohio, October 6, 1960 [1]
The Cubans absolutely deserve a representative government, and the US will never lift a finger to give it to them. Not then, and as we can see demonstrated in Venezuela today (the US regime is happy to prop up Maduro's cohort and doesn't care about conducting fair elections), not now. The US would prefer a ruthless dictatorship ruling Cuba that sends all the country's wealth to the US over a representative government that doesn't.
The Cuban economy today is a shadow of what it was before the USSR fell apart, which makes it a moot point to claim they are dysfunctional despite foreign support. The Soviets successfully managed to keep Cuba afloat. Not that that constitutes a ringing endorsement for the Cuban system.
That’s part of my point. They were a basket case with a ton of free support, and still are while trading with China and Europe. It’s just ridiculous to blame the embargo as ridiculous as the embargo is.
If you read what the Soviets had to say about the Cuban government it’s pretty damning.
My disagreement is that, as far as I know, the reputation of Cuba's healthcare system is great, and that, as someone else pointed out, the US embargo has real impact.
I certainly agree the Cuban system, excepting a few areas like healthcare and regardless of the embargo's impact, does not work.
No, but losing the wealthiest nation on the planet as a potential trading partner does mean that you are going to be selling your goods for less than you might be able to otherwise.
Being permanently locked out of the most lucrative deals obviously is going to have an economic impact.
Additionally, the US embargo limits third parties from trading freely with Cuba in certain ways, and prohibits most Americans from traveling to Cuba. Cuba was a popular destination for American tourists prior to the Revolution.
And I'm not sure I'll continue to reply to this thread. Somehow I find myself repeatedly defending the Cuban system, of which I am not a fan!
Why defend them? They have for decades exported repression, stoked civil wars, and held their own population captive.
And again the embargo doesn’t stop most countries from trading with them. They could host tourists from Europe and do, but almost no one wants to go there. I know people who go regularly for various reasons and they have to bring food with them because there’s so little on the island due to their insane agricultural practices.
The Cuban state firms don’t produce anything of value. They’re a net recipient of food aid, their tourism industry is anemic and the largest source of dollars and euros. Their medical exports have been called slave labor by the UN.
What could they possibly sell to the US? Even with endless Soviet support in the form of fuel, tractors, and agricultural experts they never produced as much food as the island did before the revolution.
The fact is that what little the government earns from trade they’ve always spent on exporting revolution. Cuban intelligence for example was helping run Venezuela’s SEBIN and secret prisons.
I’m shocked that people on hacker news defend a place that bans the internet, and locks up people for reading banned books.
You understand that all of this is a feedback loop, right? They've been under embargo for more than half a century. Do you not understand how that can cripple an economy? How it can prevent an economy from growing and developing?
You're confusing defending with pointing out objective fact. I don't have to like Cuba, it's current regime, or really anything about it to point out that acting like the state of it's economy and industry isn't massively shaped by the embargo is silly.
Hell, if it wasn't, then we could say the embargo is pointless and not having it's intended impact. We're not embargoing them just to go "Well, we at the United States of America think you guys suck." We're explicitly doing it to make them feel economic pain for their policies. It's a very strange conversation we're having where I am pointing out the embargo has worked and you're providing ethical justification for why we should embargo them but also ignoring the actual (desired!) outcome of the embargo.
They had near total subsidy from the USSR from about 1960 until 1990, and in that time they developed precisely no industry and no agricultural output. The Cuban government in the first few decades was primarily focused on exporting revolution, and not on economic development. Despite their ties to the USSR they never even produced anything that could be traded back to the Soviet block, unlike their Eastern European counterparts who also didn't trade with the west. Other communist countries outside of the Soviet orbit like Vietnam also developed local industry and the ability export some agricultural products despite also not trading with the West for a long time, but Cuba's government couldn't muster the focus or ideological flexibility to do so. When most of the communist regimes reformed agriculture and small scale industry int he 1980s, Cuba refused and continued on its ruinous course. They only slightly limited the size of state run farms in the mid 1990s, but it still didn't yield sufficient results to feed the island.
In the 2000s China was buying hundreds of tons of sugar from Cuba but stopped because the Cuban government mismanaged production and couldn't meet agreed upon deliverables. There was also a steep decline in Chinese investment from 2017 to 2022 because euphemistically Cuba couldn't protect Chinese investment, or read another way the Cuban government kept stealing from the Chinese.
These failures are NOT BECAUSE OF THE EMBARGO.
> pointing out objective fact
It's not objective fact though. You're falling for Cuban propaganda.
To be clear I'd end the embargo tomorrow if I could, but it's crazy to think that it's what held Cuba back. I won't be lectured by someone who doesn't know anything about this topic.
> They had near total subsidy from the USSR from about 1960 until 1990, and in that time they developed precisely no industry and no agricultural output. The Cuban government in the first few decades was primarily focused on exporting revolution, and not on economic development. Despite their ties to the USSR they never even produced anything that could be traded back to the Soviet block, unlike their Eastern European counterparts who also didn't trade with the west.
You mean a small island nation didn't develop a massive trade relationship with a country on the other side of the planet when their closest neighbor embargoed them? Color me shocked. What did Cuba have to trade with Russia and co that would make it worth the cost to ship to the other side of the globe? Cigars? Produce that would no longer be fresh by the time it arrived?
> Other communist countries outside of the Soviet orbit like Vietnam also developed local industry and the ability export some agricultural products despite also not trading with the West for a long time, but Cuba's government couldn't muster the focus or ideological flexibility to do so. When most of the communist regimes reformed agriculture and small scale industry int he 1980s, Cuba refused and continued on its ruinous course. They only slightly limited the size of state run farms in the mid 1990s, but it still didn't yield sufficient results to feed the island.
You mean countries geographically located near ideological partners traded more heavily with those ideological partners than a country that wasn't? Also, nice to leave out the fact that their farming during the subsidy period was made possible by the USSR providing them with fertilizer - something that they could not produce locally and obviously makes a huge impact on farming efficiency and crop yields. So no, it's not surprising that their post-USSR attempts to improve farming struggled when lacking something as basic as fertilizer, much less all of the high technology innovations that have been pouring into farming since the 70s.
> These failures are NOT BECAUSE OF THE EMBARGO.
You continue to act like all of these happen without the context of decades of embargo and being cut off from their closest potential trading partner - that also happens to be the wealthiest nation in the world.
> To be clear I'd end the embargo tomorrow if I could, but it's crazy to think that it's what held Cuba back. I won't be lectured by someone who doesn't know anything about this topic.
You're posting on a public forum. You can ignore me, but as long as I'm following the rules, I can reply to your messages. So, uh, enjoy continuing to get "lectured," whatever you seem to think that actually means in this context.
Cuba can both be a shitty place with it's own issues and also be severely impacted by being embargoed for half a century. The UN estimates over 100b in economic damages. The US State Department in 1960 explicitly said the purpose of the embargo is to 'make the greatest inroads in denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.
If you think that Cuba would not be significantly better off from an economic perspective today without the embargo you're nuts. They can still be in a subpar position because of their own corruption issues, the fact that communism doesn't seem to actually work particularly well, etc. etc. - yet also be getting completely fucked by the fact that they can't trade with the US, that ships docking in the country can't dock in the US for 6 months after, etc.
Cuba would be much better off if it wasn't for crippling sanctions imposed by the US.
Genocide by denial for decades.
To give Trump credit, at least he's open about his intentions. Much like a certain Austrian painter from the 1930s; he too was open about his plans, and no one took him seriously until it was too late.
The embargo doesn’t cover food or medical supplies, and Cuba trades with Europe and China. Cuba sucks because its government is terrible. If they could trade with the US they’d have almost nothing to trade. You don’t seenBYD electric vehicles from China there for a reason.
To anyone downvoting my sibling comment, go look at the post history [1] this guy indulges in loads of crazy conspiracies and ties them all back to Mossad. It’s pretty clear what the underlying motivation is.
reply