Lore

What if I just took a quick twenty year nap.

Without downloading new pics, where are you mentally?

This colleague is like "all these people coming out of nowhere to help me. What else could it be but god."

Imagine if we believed in and gave credit to the people who help us instead of the imaginary god... What a wonderful world where we understand where the good on earth actually comes from.

shout out to the entire generation of overachieving eldest daughters with undiagnosed ADHD who got shoved into the gifted & talented program based on test scores & then had folks demanding "why aren't you living up to your potential" for 20 years, I hope you're having a great day friends

I mean, I wouldn’t say “just as awful” when the other side advocates letting children die of measles rather than get a jab. 🙃

Yes.This is why we’re skipping meals, barely making rent and don’t have emergency$. We either spend ALL OUR MONEY on health care, or we’re dodging debt and living on aspirin and prayers. There’s no savings. There’s no ability to “just leave”. It’s all a GDP illusion that only benefits the .01%

If we weren't constantly shouting that Cops are heroes, learning LITERALLY ANYTHING ABOUT COPS might not make people so virulently anti-cop.

If we weren't constantly whitewashing racism, then not only would more US History make sense, but you'd have much less cognitive dissonance when studying it.

This is some straight up “dumbledore was gay” shit. Like. It’s true or it’s not, it doesn’t matter, it still doesn’t make you an ally when your actions betray it.

Like, one of the things that is *so infuriating* about Trump at al. is that we really are So Very Close to a futurist utopia. But a small group of people want to gatekeep who is allowed to see it.

I think it’s just zeitgeist—I haven’t read the Klein. But famine is now a political tool and entirely preventable, disease is on retreat, sustainable energy is within reach… the things we need to survive are GLOBALLY AVAILABLE—if only the will was there.

I mean, *if* we did things the right way, it would also be thru benefiting other countries. We (collective humanity) don’t have to be like this.

The real point is—we are genuinely in a world of abundance. We *have enough* for everyone to live well. It’s the shoddy distribution that ruins it.

Oh that is an *entirely different* economic clusterfuck of a topic. There’s historical reasons, cultural bias is reasons, wealth inequality reasons, etc etc… but the bottom line is that the US *could be even further* in productivity and innovation if we were less set on hamstringing ourselves

I mean, that was pre-Obamacare, but yes. The benefit to artists/creators/entrepreneurs has been *massive*.

Ok so yes. Those 41 states have the affordability expansion (although I think that is ending due to the BBB). So those states are the ones where you see the plans <5k/year for lower income folks.

The point is, in those other 9 states, plans cost 2x as much.

And it made it easier to get insurance outside of an employer plan—it has made being freelance or having a small business *much* safer because those folks also used to struggle to get insured

Pretty much. (Except that every healthy person is only temporarily healthy—at some point, everyone has some care needs!)

It also outlawed some of the absolute junk insurance scams that covered nothing, and made insurance cover things that had been optional (women’s care, mental health)

Again—being able to barely make payments and not get kicked off plan is SO MUCH BETTER than it used to be. Obamacare was a mediocre flawed compromise but has genuinely saved a lot of lives.

Obamacare was *supposed* to make it affordable with the Medicare expansion, which was the part the Supreme Court gutted. 🙃

That 10k is much better than what being uninsured costs. When I say the people making 30k are underwater in debt, I’m talking 100k+. This is why you hear about our *hospitals* running out of money—they have to treat life threatening cases, and they can’t collect 100k+ from someone making 30k.

Before Obamacare… the cost was—comparable. *slightly* cheaper. What Obamacare did was make it so people could *get* insurance. Because back in the day, they Just Wouldn’t Cover You if they suspected you might have expensive care.

This is why The People™️ have started lighting candles for St Luigi

But “the deductible” is a weird number that changes out from under you. It might be 20$ to see a dr, or 100$ to go to a hospital. But that dr who’s AT a hospital? Well. *that* dr we don’t cover at all, so that’s 2k. And he wrote you a prescription that changes cost depending where you fill it…

So, you pay the deductible and they pay “the rest”. Which mostly means “we stiff the hospital/dr out of it, but you don’t personally owe it”.

It’s easy to travel but hard to move. Not so bad if you’re in the right career, but that requires a ton of foresight and determination.

And—it takes money to move anywhere. Which is kind of the whole catch-22 when you don’t have the money to survive in the US

We can’t believe it either, but we still have to pay it to live 😭

Right, that’s an “average” year. A year of surgeries or cancer? That’s going to be debt against your future income—your wage might SAY one number, but your savings (and ability to deal with the next emergency 500$) has been completely compromised.

The biggest cost—always—is healthcare. The families that “survive” on 30k are actually underwater in medical debt just from emergency care. And you can be 3-4x that rich and still be barely making your deductibles and insurance over an average year, depending on size of your family.

I really wish we could culturally be done with the phrases “1st/3rd world countries”. They don’t mean when people use them to mean, and what people use them to mean don’t actually reflect reality in any meaningful way.

Friend is bigger than my dog! They could be snuggle buddies!

Horror has always been queer. It hasn't always been POSITIVELY queer. But it's been queer the whole time.