solowingpixy
the resident car guy
No bio...
User ID: 410
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
2d ago
young people do not rebel, they mostly submit and place the blame on other things as the system.
You have to think in the context of the fact that most people aren't exactly "Nick, 30 ans, big net taxpayer" and of generationally falling fertility. Old people welfare and healthcare are beneficial to the old, yes, and maybe too generous, but the government subsidizing the polite fiction of most retired people being financially independent is also an implicit subsidy toward working people in that they are generally spared having to feed/house/care for their elderly relatives.
Put another way, have you ever had to pay your single mom's rent, or gotten a crying phone call from her saying "I'm about to be homeless."? For most 28 year olds, the cost of paying mom’s rent would exceed their entire tax burden. Worse, imagine the case of an only child with two parents requiring something expensive like memory care, or some other chronic illness. In that case it’s almost impossible to lose as a non-exceptional taxpayer when accounting for that implicit subsidy.
The implication of this is that as working age people are facing an ever more impossible expected task in terms of eldercare they will only become more desperate to socialize the cost of preventing this. Likely, this bargain will require subsidizing the not so needy as well. Upper middle class people want their expected inheritances, after all.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
4d ago
FWIW, I also played a ton of videogames growing up. I lived in the middle of nowhere and "other kids to play with" weren't a thing that existed. I enjoyed the PS2 era, grew up on Grand Theft Auto, Madden, and Max Payne. My username is a reference to Ace Combat: The Belkan War.
Unlike you, I mostly played single player. LAN parties were a thing in boarding school such that I briefly became competent (but not good!) at Counter Strike: Source and had built a modest gaming PC, but I didn't get into the likes of WOW and wasn't very good at RTS games. Around 18 I mostly lost interest. PS3 games were slow to appear and Madden in particular was godawful after the switch. I never got into multiplayer online aside from Battlefield 3. That, and GTA 4 and the DLCs were the highlight of my time with the PS3.
I've occasionally had games reel me back in, but rarely. Far Cry 4 and 5 were fun but I wasn't impressed with Far Cry 6. Metro 2033 and and Ace Combat 7 were fun, but didn't keep me reeled in long term. My PS4 mostly collects dust these days and if anything I wish it could play the old PS2 games so I could give B7R another go.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
4d ago
In lieu of something actually interesting (We're nearing "Three months on a bootleg Chinese GLP" and "10 months in a trucking office"; the latter has potential.), I present an update on [my bum elbow].
A month later, and four doctor's visits (one urgent care, orthopedist No. 1, CT scan, and orthopedist No. 2) later my HSA is soon to be some hundreds of dollars poorer (On that note, why does every practice seem to have its own app, and how do I even find what I owe after the insurance discount to pay it? Is someone going to mail/email me a bill at some point? I'm used to just paying urgent cares cash up front like a pleb.), my elbow thoroughly scanned and X-rayed, and the answer is about what I thought it was, something along the lines of "not great, not terrible".
"Wow, that's an ugly elbow. Can you move that thing?", the nurse for ortho No. 1 remarked upon seeing the X-ray with a tone of bemusement that I found charming. The urgent care doc had supplied a decadron shot and prescribed some variety of steroid shots for the road as expected, but referred me to his buddy at the local ortho clinic to try and get to the bottom of my elbow seemingly going on strike at random. Both ortho appointments were remarkably short and the questions remarkably repetitive, be they from the screening nurse or the doctors themselves. One wonders if anyone takes notes given how many times I had to answer "Why are you here?". "function normally limited but not intrusively bothersome, flare ups ranging from annoying to seriously intrusive and crippling, flare ups have become more frequent and severe with age". Ortho No.1 was more gung-ho about arthroscopic surgery. Ortho No. 2, apparently the "elbow guy" (Why didn't I get the elbow guy the first time?), was more conservative, advocating a "wait and watch" approach.
The verdict: Yup, the joint has lots of arthritis, the cartilage is gone, and there are some bone fragments floating around that might be catching and causing range of motion issues. Some nerve damage/muscle atrophy is visible on the left hand. That said: if it doesn't get much worse doing nothing might be the correct answer here. The bad news is that we're unlikely to achieve serious improvement with surgery (No lifting weights for you!). The good news is that it probably won't get much worse or at least won't get worse quickly and if the situation does degrade we can probably get you back to "not great, not terrible" with a scalpel.
Here's hoping this has just been an anomalously bad spring, things will stabilize, and I'll have forgotten about this by the time its solidly summer. I do know that traveling up north for Easter, driving through a big storm, and then smack into a major cold front was most likely the faux pas that provoked the latest flare up.
Until the bond vigilantes say otherwise, this empirically hasn't been the case, as evidenced by G7 sovereign debt levels since 2000. Unfortunately, since the Silent Generation RJ Reynolds and Phillip Morris (aka. cigarettes) haven't been utilized to their full potential, and those pesky doctors have gotten better at keeping people alive, so balancing the books is getting harder even before we take falling fertility into account.
I did pay my mom's rent, because she was poorly paid, exited the divorce with no property, and, shocker, the man she divorced for being bad at paying the bills defaulted on the alimony as soon as their child was off to college and out of the blast radius. I was the only kid who wasn't still in college or flat broke ("Lying flat" is absolutely the winning strategy when it comes to avoiding familial obligations. No one expects any help from the broke fuckup sibling, but is that really how you want to live?). If not for some dubious VA disability (Semper-Fi!) my mother would presently be begging me for money. Boomer UBI just stops this from happening to a potentially large amount of people at ~65. It's easy to say "They'll just have to accept a lower standard of living.", but do you want to have to tell Mom to eat shit or move her into your house?
Maybe I'm missing something and my family are filled with an atypically large amount of fuckups (This is definitely the case for my father's side; on mom's side at least the Gen X men have their shit together.), but I'm pretty sure that Boomer welfare is the only thing sparing large amounts of the working and middle class from dealing with this sort of stuff until Mom becomes too old to live independently for medical reasons.
I'm not even endorsing fiscal gerontocracy, necessarily. I'm just giving a reason why people support it, and we haven't even gotten into how many people's jobs rely on the government subsidizing retirees' bills.
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