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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 2, 2026

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Well, where are you going to live? Renting is infeasible (by design). Are you going to buy a different house that also has a fake and gay high price?

For many boomers, the answer to that question is "an assisted living facility/a retirement home". This facility then will charge both rent and service fees that are so absurdly fake and gay high, that it will be able to transfer the entire value of the sold house into the hands of private equity firms and the medical industry in just a few years. Just in time before anybody can inherit anything.

It's almost as if they designed the entire system in a way that explicitly allows private equity to drain trillions of dollars from the middle class.

It's almost as if they designed the entire system in a way that explicitly allows private equity to drain trillions of dollars from the middle class.

Almost -- probably good to keep in mind that for children that would rather inherit, the option does exist to not do this. You can certainly move your elderly parents in with you and bear that burden, people do -- it is very difficult, but that just means that the money siphoned off is in a sense payment for services rendered by the MedIC to the heirs.

I mean it does but also the progress of modern medicine and availability of ways to glean out extra lifeyears means that it's harder for a family to provide adequate senescence care.

I do have personal experience in this area -- granted that was a while ago, but if it's become harder that's an argument that it's worth more money than it was, yeah?

I think you're both bringing up good points, and I'd say that the conversation points towards the ultimate speciousness of elderly care being explicitly designed to be a wealth transfer, POASIWID notwithstanding. I also have painful personal experience in this area and quite current as well, and as a result I have another half-formed effortpost on this subject which this margin is too small to contain, but factor in the pieces that have been brought up, throw in how much more difficult it is to have someone home round-the-clock to watch grandma/grandpa in this age of both spouses working being the norm, as well as how expensive round-the-clock care typically is in general, and add in a side of all of the family dysfunction typically coming out to play and that'll do for the general outline of said post, with a conclusion of eldercare being classically and necessarily a wicked problem, especially given that healthcare in the US is, in and of itself, another wicked problem.

Also family sizes being smaller makes it trickier. I've got a 100+ year old great grandma in law who had 12 kids, most of whom stayed fairly local and produced their own numerous progeny.

It's considerably more practical to care for her being split between like 5 different households versus if it were a succession of nuclear families