HighResolutionSleep
No bio...
User ID: 172
HighResolutionSleep
1d ago
Americans are not a curated performance designed for the consumption of a particular audience. I've heard this isn't a flaw unique to my people.
HighResolutionSleep
1d ago
Well, the good news is that if you'd like to stop hearing what Americans think of you, you'll have no problems curating an accurate block list. What's stopping you?
HighResolutionSleep
1d ago
I think national identification should be opt-in. This seems to me to be straightforwardly the best possible world. It would protect online anonymity for those who want to preserve it at maximum capacity, short-circuit bad faith "doxxing" objections, and allow those who wish to pass themselves off as belonging to a particular nationality to prove it.
If someone want to present themselves as American, I'm pretty sure replying to their post with "nationality kept private" on their profile would pack about 90% of the same rhetorical punch as the actual information being there, while carrying almost 0% of the downsides.
Sure, my country might have been founded by anonpoasters, but due to technological limitations, those reading The Federalist could at least be reasonably certain that they were American anonpoasters.
HighResolutionSleep
1d ago
As I'm sure you're painfully aware, we Americans are almost categorically unashamed to boldly declare our nationality to anyone who will listen. It's a complaint I hear a lot of.
So, per the original complaint, you're unlikely to have unidentified foreign influence contaminating your information space, at least from Americans.
HighResolutionSleep
6d ago
You can't switch from a Big Mac to a NY Strip and call it inflation, it has to be a fundamentally comparable good.
Cool, so base the numbers on comparing like goods and stop fucking with them. How is a bureaucrat supposed to measure how much more better the Philly Cheese-steak is? This also doesn't solve the double counting problem. The BLT doesn't count for less dollars in the GDP line go up so shut up data.
EDIT: It also doesn't solve the problem that, in a lot of cases, consumers stopped buying the Big Mac because it was outlawed.
Gas is impossible to game, a gallon is a gallon
Unfortunately, you cannot eat or live in gas.
HighResolutionSleep
7d ago
Right, but that doesn't change the fact that the car is now, in fact, more expensive than it was before, which is what a measure of inflation is supposed to capture.
This fraud is revealed when the same discounting principle isn't applied to, say, GDP, or other "good numbers". Oh yes, you bet your ass the extra dollars get counted there. With this neat trick, you get to double, triple, maybe even quadruple count the benefits of a technology or innovation.
Things in the past were going well enough for the common man that there wasn't much to notice here, but now that John Everyman is getting squeezed from all angles, the official numbers are starting to look suspicious. Hard to ignore the dissonance when your typical bag of groceries jumps 20% and the official numbers are still like "3% :)". Becomes clear that the numbers aren't about you or people like you. There's so much witchcraft that goes into these numbers anyway that they are essentially a matter of interpretation rather than fact, and it's becoming clear to a lot of people that it's a picture painted by a club they're not in. And yeah, I guess if you're an upperclassman like Scott is now, it's easy to believe everything's great. But if you're a member of the Rent Food Gas class, you have been getting obliterated.
It's actually difficult for me to believe the level of condescension that these people are speaking to the working class. I couldn't imagine biting the hand that feeds me that hard. Maybe we need a little bit of rising Bolshevism to remind these people who actually runs the place.
HighResolutionSleep
26d ago
Well, all I can say for sure is that I've never met one asking about the hospital bills I never paid, and that debt collectors are notorious for collecting on things they have no business doing so. Consult your local and state laws.
HighResolutionSleep
26d ago
Personally, I'm speaking from two different articles of personal experience:
- Knowing both a nurse and an EMT, who have seen the internals of hospital billing and know how the sausage is made, both of whom have advised me to not pay hospital bills if I do not feel like it;
- My doing exactly this multiple times, and suffering no negative consequences whatsoever.
I don't know the parameters of how these reddit people were sought after. Perhaps I've seen so much success because I establish myself as a nonpayer immediately. I've heard from sources on the internet sounding credible that there's some arcane legal black magicks wherein one can be bound to a largely fictitious debt by sending its conjurer so much as a single dollar. Some sign on penalty of perjury that they are owed an imaginary debt on the hopes the legal ritual will coerce payment from targets. I'm sure there's a lot of Weird Tricks that people can use to extract money from hapless victims.
However, my personal experience with medical bills has been as follows: I go to the hospital to get something done, I get something in the mail that says something to the effect of "after your insurance paid 100 gorillion dollars, your remaining balance is 10 gorillion dollars, please send check or money order", I throw this demand directly into the trash, and I never hear about it ever again. It goes to the same black void as the jury summons. One time I got three invoices, from three different organizations, demanding three separate pounds of flesh for one thing I got done at a hospital. I ignored them all, and never heard from any of them ever again.
I'm not saying that this is applicable to all bills one can receive from a hospital, or that this maneuver could be pulled in any American jurisdiction, etc. I'm just saying that people getting demands from hospitals should consider their nonpayment options, if available.
It's been said that you can't con an honest man, but this may be another wisdom that modernity has turned on its head.
HighResolutionSleep
26d ago
From what I've heard, they can certainly "send it to collections", in the sense that they can give it to an internal department to harass you about it. But they can't actually sell it to real collectors who ostensibly have a legally enforceable debt that they can collect from you, and who ostensibly have a legal justification to put marks on your credit score. I'd be curious to know if these individuals you know actually got marks from this specifically.
An even if they do, there's an entire playbook for effectively telling these people to fuck off. I've never had to use it, because in my experience, it never even got to the harassment part. Once again I will say that your experience may vary depending on many, many factors, but I would just urge anyone reading to appreciate that fact that just because someone shoves an invoice at you doesn't mean you have to pay it.
HighResolutionSleep
26d ago
I would like to stress that I don't know the exact conditions under which this works—so please take this strategy at your own advisement and peril—but I have had multiple hospital visits in my life so far and have gotten away with paying exactly $0 by simply ignoring demands for money. These were organizations that had all of my info, my insurance, knew where I worked and lived, etc—and so far I've experienced no durable negative repercussions.
Your mileage may vary.
HighResolutionSleep
26d ago
My understanding is that there are many cases in which there is essentially nothing substantive that they can do, not even touching your credit score. I don't know if this changes if you, for example, sign something ahead of time that explicitly says you agree to pay with specified remediation if you don't, etc. This is why I urge the poster to evaluate their position for the freedom to decline paying, and consider taking that option if it exists.
HighResolutionSleep
26d ago
Thankfully, it's not a huge dollar figure, but it's the sheer stupidity of clinging to price opacity, which inevitably finds some way to reach into my pocket and pull out more money, that annoys me.
Suggestion: consider not paying. My conversations with a few in the know and my personal experience has led me to the understanding that in the US, in many cases, paying hospital bills is essentially optional. Like many modern systems, it's one that relies on the charity of good faith actors to subsidize deadbeats.
A while ago I went to the hospital to get a scan done. After taking an obscene amount of money from my insurance, I got no less than three invoices in the mail: one from the hospital, one from the hospital's network, and one from a radiologist society or something, all claiming that I owed them money. I never paid out a cent, and nothing ever happened.
I am not a lawyer and I don't know your specific situation, but consider the virtues of simply refusing to pay.
I thought we were talking about something else; sorry to interrupt.
More options
Context Copy link