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Joined 5 months ago
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Cake day: February 6th, 2024

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  • I’ve received in-patient care, overnight studies, emergency procedures, and much more in Spain without ever paying a dollar in copays or fees, and I’ve never waited more than 2 weeks for non-urgent care or an hour for urgent care.

    My taxes are $600/month total in Madrid. Given that I have epilepsy, my insurance alone in the US was $490/month, AND I paid more in taxes ($1100/month).

    So, yes, universal healthcare isn’t “free,” and it’s supported by taxes. And still, Americans are taxed more AND have to pay for insurance? And then you still have to pay copays? I don’t think “dur dur me taxes!” is actually the strong argument you think it is. And wait times are no longer (or in fact are shorter) in many countries with universal healthcare. But you know what’s longer? Life expectancies.



  • I mean Venom is injured all the time in ways that would clearly impact a body within it. So either the host body goes full caterpillar-coccoon and is basically jelly while Venom is fully formed, or the host’s body becomes immune to injury/near fully regenerable, in which case Venom could wreck the host’s face without worry.





  • Neighborhoods have their own identities, but in most places, what makes something a neighborhood rather than its own town is the fact that it is surrounded by other neighborhoods that are immediately accessible. That’s why Lincoln Park in Chicago and Soho NY are neighborhoods, but they use a whole different term to identify Manhattan from Long Island and so on. Those are properly boroughs rather than neighborhoods, as they are big, physically separated, and it’s not that easy to get between them, which leads to each almost being considered its own city. And it’s still harder to get between LA neighborhoods than it is to literally cross the (admittedly very thin) stretch of ocean between Manhattan and Brooklyn.

    And I don’t think there’s any similarity between your second example, looking at how someone interacts with the whole of a country, and this question of how someone interacts with their local community. Countries are of course big enough that folks might see less than 50% of their own and still love it. But it’s much harder to consider someone an expert or proud local of a “city” they don’t visit 90% of. You can be a countryman and see only 30% of your country, but you can’t really be a local and see only 10% of your city.



  • Ok but LA sucks for reasons that have nothing to do with what I want from a city and everything to do with what everyone wants from a city: walkability, affordability, good roads/traffic and infrastructure, good vibes, authenticity, public transit, and people who don’t suck.

    Even people who are from LA and say “we have all that and I love LA” only mean “I love my neighborhood in LA, which is a 90 minute drive from the 7 other malignancies of highway sprawl that also call themselves LA.”