FlailingAce
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User ID: 1084
FlailingAce
4d ago
I'm with you that having kids can lead to responsibility, in the right circumstances (i.e. where the people involved have the right mentality about it). But I also know a young couple where the woman had a baby with the man (his second) in order to lock him down and maybe grow him up, but he has remained a deadbeat and has also convinced her to quit her own career. They now live in her grandmother's basement and don't pay rent. So I would caution about a blanket recommendation to have kids early - it should be applied to those who are already ideologically and mentally prepared, and those kinds of people will likely be okay with or without the kids.
FlailingAce
15d ago
Our understanding of insurgency is pretty developed at this point, and applying more violence is not the answer.
The problem in Afghanistan was lack of clarity from the very top about America's goals, which is why the military couldn't build a coherent insurgency or counter-insurgency plan. Instead they just applied violence to whoever happened to be looking funny at the US at any given moment. More of that would have been disastrous.
FlailingAce
15d ago
I didn't say anything of the sort. I said he most likely saw the girl brandishing those weapons and tried to document it. I think this is consistent with both his and her actions in the clip.
FlailingAce
15d ago
Having finally watched the video, I am so confused at people's takes on this. The guy filming is clearly trying to do one thing - get a video of the preteen open carrying a knife and an axe. She's not 'intimidating him', she's cracking under the pressure and revealing her illegal behavior. And he's not a 'creep' (the most plausible reason people might think that is because he has a foreign accent and doesn't clearly articulate what he's about) but it's absolutely obvious from the video that his concern is documenting the armed children hanging out in the park.
I'm generally opposed to the excessive levels of immigration in western countries, but this video makes me more sympathetic to the immigrants. Poor guy was probably just walking in the park when the psychotic natives started brandishing weapons at him.
I guess I don't have much else substantive to add, except to note that the whole story seemed much more interesting to me until I finally got around to watching the video myself. I wonder how many culture warriors out there also haven't even bothered to watch the video, or already had their minds made up by 2nd and 3rd hand commentaries so that they couldn't take in the primary source objectively.
FlailingAce
17d ago
It seems to me that you're conflating pricing and insurance.
You can imagine a world where prices factor in the expected cost, but we're not in that world. If I have a complication in a routine procedure, they will charge extra to handle the complication. Then my insurance spreads that extra cost between a pool of policy holders. The pricing for the procedure doesn't spread the cost, and doesn't need to, because that's the purpose of the insurance. Instead, insurance will pay the minimum it can get away with for a specific procedure. They sure as hell aren't paying $2000 for a $1000 cost procedure because sometimes things go wrong - they pay $1000 and then upcharge when things go wrong.
FlailingAce
18d ago
I mean in the sense that doesn't match the meaning of 'price'. Conceptually a price is a fixed value that you will pay, not a variable. If you come in my store and ask the price of a sandwich, and I tell you $10, and then when you check out you're expected to pay $15, you would rightfully tell me I lied about the price.
FlailingAce
18d ago
Many don't like this but you can't really function in our system without having insurance
If you were to attempt to function in the system without insurance, how would you go about it? Asking for myself.
When I was younger I went uninsured for a few years, and a few more on a catastrophic plan, and happily didn't have any issues. Now I'm older and married and my wife has a lot of worries about not being insured (I currently have full health care coverage from my job but I'm about to leave that career). Conceptually I think 'health insurance' is a misnomer the way it's typically used, that only high cap catastrophic plans actually constitute insurance, and frankly that I'd much prefer saving and investing my money instead of giving it to an insurance company.
However, anecdotally I've heard it's a real pain to get medical care if you show up and say you don't have insurance, and that you'll just pay for everything yourself. So, do you have any advice on how to do that effectively?
FlailingAce
18d ago
Major complications of surgery are 1%-10% depending what we are talking about, certainly orders of magnitude more (yes I know I'm missing some things about car insurance for the sake of simplicity)
As long as these are reasonably predictable, you can calculate a price.
I don't think that's true at all. You can calculate an expected value, but 90%+ of patients won't understand that. If you tell them the price of a procedure is $2000 dollars, but the typical/median price is $1000 and the max is a million, how are they supposed to use that information?
FlailingAce
21d ago
Thank goodness the government is finally diversifying its investment holdings. Do you know that most of our money is in low yield Treasury bonds? It's no wonder USG is nearly bankrupt. As a stakeholder myself I'm a big fan of this move, though I would still prefer a more balanced portfolio.
It's not clear what you mean by traditionalism here. Do you mean the bells and whistles of e.g. traditional Christian religion? Tradcaths going to latin mass? Or do you mean eschewing modern ways of life, like the Amish? Because both those kinds of people exist.
More sensible to me would be the idea of traditionalism as a set of values, I can at least imagine you think it's not possible to really believe, say, that society should be paternalistic, because we're so inculcated with Western society's propaganda. But you haven't made this claim explicit, or provided any evidence for it. I would in fact argue the opposite, that paternalistic societies are on the rise - see most of the 'right-leaning' countries e.g. Hungary or Poland, as well as autocratic ones like Russia and China - and that far from LARPing, people including these retvrners are actively seeking and finding different ways of organizing society that are competing with the liberals/progressives.
I also disagree with your idea that we should argue people into traditional values. Most people don't respond to arguments like you apparently did. What they respond to is seeing a better way of living. "In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven."
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