Aceticon

Whilst that is indeed true for the population in general, politicians are a bunch of people self-selected on being the kind who wants power.

That kind of personality is generally less trustworthy (and more on the sociopath side of the spectrum) than the general population.

There's actually a study published ages ago in the Harvard Business review about corporate CEOs (so, not politicians but in many ways similar) which found that the ones who got the job not because they sought it but because of other reasons (for example, the CEO died and they were the next in line) actually performed better (as measured by the performance of the companies they led compared to the rest of their industry) than CEOs who had sought that position and, even more interestingly, the most self-celebrating showoff CEOs were the worst performing of all (from my own participation with politics I would say those would be the closest in personality to top politicians).

Further, there are various pretty old sayings (back from the time of the Ancient Greeks and the Romans) about the best person to get a leadership position being the one who doesn't want a leadership position.

So I would say that most politicians in parties with higher chances of getting power (so, in most countries, the two largest parties) are crooked (not specifically corruption - such as getting money to pass certain laws of using certain companies for government contracts - but more generally using power, privileged information, influence and connections to benefit themselves even to the detriment of those who voted for them: a good example of crookedness but not corruption is how some US Congressmen use insider information they get in some Congressional Committees to profit in stock market trading).

They're "posh" neoliberal shit, so people who never lived in Britain can't really identify it as just a variant of the same of swindle as the NYT done in the service of a similar kind of elites.

As a person who actually lived in the UK and read The Guardian for maybe a decade, in my opinion it's a neoliberal propaganda outlet and it's definitely (not just opinion, actual fact) pretty much just maned (last I checked all journalists but 2) by people from a high upper middle class and upper class background (what in the UK is called "Public School Educated", which curiously doesn't mean a State School, it means an expensive private school).

All you have to do is look back at the Snowden Leaks - The Guardian did leak the Snowden information but not soon after the Newspaper Editor there who was part of it got kicked out and the coverage of it changed 180 degrees, to the point that whilst the UK Government was busy retroactively making legal all that eavesdropping (unlike the US, were some of it was rolled back) The Guardian was mute about it.

(Whilst I believe The Guardian had genuine Leftwing and pro-Democracy journalists - and last I checked, it still has two of them - they're the exception rather than the rule as the natural tendency of both its Board and most of its staff is Neoliberalism in very much the same vein as the NYT as well as massivelly pro-System - with their coverage of The Royals being fawning to the point of servilism - which is why the Editor who published Snowden got kicked out as soon as the focus on it moved out)

It also has had some real extreme Fashion-following Upper Class Identity Warrior articles over the years, like the one from a self-proclaimed Feminist criticizing men who use sex dolls (I! Kid! You! Not!) totally oblivious to how her article was in exactly the same pattern as used a decade or two earlier to criticize homosexuality.

Last but not least (I have material here to go all day, but lets not) don't get me started on how they were a massive part of the campaign to slander Corbyn (a leftwinger who some years ago got elected leader of the Labour party, taking it of the hands of the Neoliberals who led it for 2 decades), a campaign which overwhelmingly relied on anti-semitism accusations, done together with UK based Israeli-linked Jewish groups and which was so ridiculous that they literally accused a Jewish Holocaust Survivor of being anti-semite for comparing some of the actions of Israel with those of the Nazis (this was some years ago) and thus taint Corbyn by association as they were both on the same panel in a conference.

(The present day Zionist Genocide and the use of such anti-semitism accusations to slander critics of their mass murder, really gives us some perspective on the true nature of such slander and those who use it. The anti-Corbyn campaign on which The Guardian so eagerly participated was very much an early trial run of the use by Israel - with again The Guardian eagerly participating, though they've stopped it after a while - of such Identity Politics to shore up support for and deflect criticism of their Genocide)

They're slippery posh twats at The Guardian who don't just straightforward lie like populists do and instead use cherry-picking, half-truths and other deceit techniques in their "opinion making" (some of their journalists have openly admitted that their work is making opinion), basically like the New York Times but with the benefits of a more elegant style of dialectics, argument building and word usage that comes for having had a posh education at so-called Public Schools.

Here's some "" that fell off your post.

I think they were hanging around the word civilized.

The UK NHI doesn't work well because the neoliberal parties in successive governments (both the Tories and New Labour) have been defunding it so that they can - like Thatcher did with the railways - once its quality has fallen due to lack of funds claim that it's bad because of Public management whilst it would be much better if it was Private because the Private Sector is much more competent, and privatise it.

Just like the US has fatcats that are perfectly happy to mass murder people for personal profit, so does the UK (and the British Political System is almost as bad as the American, so it's definitelly sold to the highest bidder) and plenty of those jhave wet dreams of the country having 13% of its GDP flowing through a Private Healthcare sector like the US were they can make billions of pounds doing exactly the same as the fatcats do in US Healthcare.

Source: I lived in Britain for over a decade.

By the way, you "read that the UK NHI doesn't work very well" is exactly because the UK media is overwhelmingly owned by tax avoiding billionaires who are part of the above mentioned fatcats who see themselves as profiting massivelly from Britain having a Healthcare System like the US. It's not by chance that the level of trust of Britons in their Press is one of the lowest in Europe.

The exact same kind of tactics were deployed by Tatcher back when she wanted to privatise the Railways with the result that satisfaction with the Railway system in the UK is now even lower than when there was a public operator even after Thatcher defunded it to claim "Public is Bad, Private is Good" to amass enough public support to privatise it.

From what I've seen, treatments not being covered are only the case were those treatments are very expensive and there are other effective treatments (though less effective) which are much cheaper.

There's also often a delay between a new and very expensive experimental treatment coming out and it becoming covered because it won't be covered if it doesn't demonstrate that it's advantages over the other available treatments are sufficient to justify the additional cost.

Mind you, I'm talking about Public Healthcare Systems, not the so-called Mixed Systems that have mandatory Health Insurance (usually highly regulated and with a Public Insurance option for the less well off) - Mixed Systems have some of the same problems as the US System at least in my experience living in countries with one and with the other kind of system.

I'm talking about Universal Health Care systems (for clarity: totally free healthcare for residents in that country), not Public Health Insurance systems.

Europe is unfortunatelly also riddled with the latter system and having lived in countries with one kind and countries with the other, they're quite different and the system with Insurance is invariably worse in terms of denials of coverage as well as cost (also because nowadays they all have laws that force every resident to have health insurance, which as result is more costlier than before those laws - as I saw first hand when I lived in a country with such a system when such a law came into effect), whilst UHC tends to have longer waiting lists (think 1 or 2 years of wait for some cirurgical procedures).

Absolutelly, some of the absurdities of the US system are also present in the so-called "Mixed" Systems (i.e. the ones with healtcare insurance but more regulated and with a public option for some) and if you look at the kinds of governments in those countries for the last 3 decades, you'll notice they've been invariably neoliberal mainstream parties (setting up such systems is part of the broader tendency in Europe to privatise just about everything that has been going on since the 80s and was copied from the US).

IMHO, except for the long waiting times, the problems with Healthcare systems in part of Europe are the result of them having been transformed to become more like the US system in the last 3 decades.

Fair enough.

Lutris will also let you install a game from a GoG offline installer using the install script from GoG (using the script means that if there are dependencies like the game needing a specific DirectX version it gets automatically configured in Wine).

Also if I understand correctly the article, going via Bottles means you have a single Wine "instance" (i.e. a wine prefix) for all your GoG games - as GoG access in managed via GoG Galaxy which is a Windows program - whilst Lutris by default gives you one wine prefix per game, so it's a bit better isolated and you can chose different Wine versions for different games (for those games were latest is not bestest).

Last but not least, if you want further isolation from your system in Lutris there is a "command prefix" option (under runtime options if I remember it correctly) where you can put the prefix for the command that runs wine with your game, which let's you run things like firejail which sandbox the whole Wine instance and whatever game it's being used to run (in my system I have it as default, configured to deny things like network access and privilege escalation). This is maybe more applicable for people sailing the high seas, but it will also do things like blocking games from sending game analytics over the network if configure as I did to block network access.

In several countries the mainstream party politicians (who are Neoliberals) have been slowly privatising healthcare by forcing the Public Healthcare System to outsource more and more of the work to the Private Sector and using the same technique as Thatcher in the UK used to privatise railroads (of which now, decades later, you can see the horrible results) - defund the Public Service and when the quality falls because of it claim that the Public Sector is always incompetent and the the Private is always competent so that's why that Public Service had problems hence it needs to be privatised to improve.

On top of that there is the actual genuine problem (rather than artificial meddling with the Public Healthcare System to send more money into the hands of politician's mates) that populations are aging and older people require much more Healthcare Services in average.

I've lived in a couple of countries in Europe and some have Universal Healthcare systems (such as the UK and Portugal) but others such as The Netherlands and Germany have Mixed Systems with Health Insurance but highly regulated and were some people can get Health Insurance from the state.

You're not going to go bankrupt from the treatment or get treatment denied in countries with UHC.

However if you lose your job or never find a job in the first place due to illness related issues or disabilities you'll almost certainly end up on benefits which again can be better or worse depending in the country.

I would say things have been getting worse all over Europe (personally I think it's exactly because there's been too much copying of shit from the US), especially when it comes to the level of benefits for poor people being sufficient (the house prices bubbles all over the place and the lack of building of social housing have made this a massive problem in most countries), but that's not the same as simply going bankrupt from medical bills because you've had an accident, ended up in an emergency ward and got a life saving surgery.

So it's literally something that's not legally supposed to happen, unlike in the US.