• DPUGT
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    3 years ago

    People like you is what’s wrong with the US. But I’m OK with it, I live in a country where I don’t have to stop eating to pay medical bills.

    I haven’t needed to stop eating to pay medical bills.

    but your country is on its way to implod

    It is an accident of geography that I was born here. The government of the United States holds no special place in my heart, anymore than the Roman Republic or the Kingdom of Wessex. If it implodes, it implodes. Nothing important will have been lost.

    If you feel differently for your country, whereever that is, how can you even love your family? Your country has become some sort of emotional surrogate for them. It’s sort of fucked up.

      • DPUGT
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        3 years ago

        Yes, because you are lucky enough to be able to afford an insurance. Lose your job and see what happens.

        Just took a new job. The insurance is far worse than at the last job (pay is better though). Decided to not get insurance during open enrollment. My wife and I analyzed the options, and we decided that we’d be better off just squirreling away the cash than to pay premiums for shit insurance that covered little.

        We don’t have significant medical bills.

        If you country implodes, you live in it.

        It’s been imploding since I was born. The 1970s were a wild ride, even if I only vaguely remember the last few years of it. The 1980s were little better, we did drills in school to crawl under our desks in the event of nuclear bombardment.

        Short of a shooting war, there’s very little the “implosion” can do to me that I haven’t seen. And if that happens, I plan on being somewhere else entirely about 12 months before the first bullet flies. Even have some gold stashed away to bribe whichever border guards need bribing. Fake passports are getting harder to come by though, that’s worrisome.

        Any attempt to emotionally take me hostage and attempt to fix the unfixable is going to fail. They’re all monkeys here, and you just have to accept that monkeys fling shit. It’s even kind of funny to watch, if you learn to duck the turds.

        US individualism is killing its people

        Possibly. But it’s not killing me and mine. In fact, it’s saving me and mine, when the non-individualism has so many whining about how their welfare checks are too small and flipping burgers isn’t a salary career with living wages. I’ve got a better deal, and you’re trying to talk me into taking the worse one.

          • DPUGT
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            3 years ago

            Then why do you still live in such a country?

            I have to live somewhere. I don’t know of any that are better, just different kinds of “bad”. You seem to believe “living better” is an objective thing, but it is subjective of course. And you and I don’t want to live the same way. If you bothered to see things from my perspective, you’d understand how silly your question is.

            You have the wrong idea of what having a public welfare service means. I don’t need welfare checks to live here

            You have lived so long in the system that it’s invisible to you. The welfare no longer looks like welfare. It’s just an entitlement to you. You deserve it. You’ve earned it. Just by being there. They owe it to you. Once you’ve adopted that mindset, how can it ever be welfare again? But from the other end, how can your government even engage in charity? For them, you have become livestock they have a duty to keep fed.

            And my children will be able to study in any university even if I don’t earn enough money to pay for it

            It used to be the case in the US. But somewhere the politicians got the idea that sending 100% of the population to university was not just an ideal or even a goal, but an absolute requirement.

            Opportunity costs being what they are, the price skyrocketed. It actually costs more than twice as much to send twice as many kids to college. And so the price rose. And colleges became more competitive for those dollars, but to stay competitive they have to be nicer colleges with nicer dorms and nicer campuses and nicer amenities. But those things cost more, so the costs were passed on to the students who were indoctrinated to believe that if they didn’t go they’d be losers. And then bankruptcy for student loans was rescinded, and grants turned into loans that can’t ever be defaulted.

            Perverse incentives are a removed.

            I can’t tell which European country you’re from, and you don’t have to tell me, but all students don’t go to university there either. We can be honest, can’t we?