People are probably thinking “fuck it, let’s go with the upheaval! Let’s get rid of the silly base 60 system!”. Ok then. First, we could divide the length of a year into 100 days. Wait, no, that has to be 365 because otherwise the seasons would get out of whack.
Ok, but we could definitely have 10 months right? They did that before. Perfection. So every month should have exactly … Uh 36.5 days… fuck
Well, how about having 10 day weeks? Shit. Same type of problem.
Fine, let’s ignore months and weeks. What about the 24 hour day? Instead, we could break the day into 100 units. Each unit would be 14.4 “old minutes” long. That seems fine. You could subdivide that into 100 subunits, each of which would be about 8.6 “old seconds”. To keep things reasonable the final divisor would be 10, so our new short “human counting” units would be about 0.86s. Groovy. Pity that years, months and weeks don’t work out.
So why are there “really” 360s in an hour? Probably for the same reason that there are 360⁰ in a circle. Early astromomers and mathematicians probably thought that the universe was a perfectly created system. They likely modelled dates and geometry on earth’s annual journey through the sky, but we’re a little bit “off”. Like how the months are supposedly lunar. We only discarded the idea of perfect celestial spheres relatively recently.
So they want to ban taxpayer funding.
I’m not an American, but how much tax funding goes into regular healthcare, and where the fuck does that money go? Because we hear horror stories over here in Europe that an ambulance callout in the US costs thousands of dollars, giving birth costs thousands of dollars, moderately wealthy people with health insurance have been bankrupted by cancer. In many European countries stuff like that doesn’t really cost you anything. In the UK for example, a visit to your GP is free, as is most medication. In other EU countries a GP is about €65, unless you’re on social welfare, in which case it’s free. And if your GP refers you for a scan or procedure, you generally don’t pay anything. The issue with free healthcare is the waiting time. You can choose to go private to cut the waiting time (in which case you need health insurance, because an MRI + overnight in hospital + procedure + plus drugs might cost €5k). But where a condition is considered an emergency (heart attack, road accident, possible cancer diagnosis) there isn’t a long wait for life-saving treatment. If a car runs you over, an ambulance brings you to the hospital and they treat you - no money change hands. My older sister had terminal cancer, and throughout the entire thing she paid €0 for various operations, scans, drugs and 2 ambulance callouts. She had health insurance, but with cancer, regular healthcare kinda supercedes it. Healthcare gives your more options, but she found that the “best of the best” oncologists and cancer treatment were available for free at the public hospital.
So, a very long run up to my question: WTF healthcare actually gets taxpayer funding in the US, and how are basic things like an ambulance or insulin insanely expensive?