Cigarettes should be too expensive for anyone to buy. They ruin a lot of beautiful moments. I hate being at some party and having some idiot forcing these cancer particles into my nose because they’re too lazy to go outside to smoke.
Sounds like you haven’t invented Europe yet, even if you spring for a non-Eastern vareity it does make the price of dino juice, houses and cigarettes increase
Medicine
£110/year or so for unlimited medicine prescribed by a doctor
Health insurance
Who needs it
College
Usually free or at least heavily subsidised (even in places like the UK where you’re paying £10k/year the government also plays about £5k-40k towards it depending on what course etc.)
Biodome is pretty consistently available on free TV channels. So is Jury Duty and In The Army Now. But Son in Law is, like, super fucking rare for some reason.
Some stuff in the US is pretty cool and money is nice and all, but then I have friends in senior positions within big tech who have only 12 days of paid time off which is real shitty.
At least they can work remotely for a few days so they get a couple of decent holidays, but that just means they can never fully disconnect.
And they can just use the healthcare system here when they’re back, which is nice for them but I’m sure not everyone has that luxury.
Ya I get off on the 4th of July and Christmas. That’s it. But they give 2 weeks of floating holidays in lieu of that, 3 weeks PTO and 2 weeks of sick time per year. That’s a great setup in my industry and I attribute it to them being from the Netherlands. I also work 12 hr shifts and anything beyond 8 is OT, which is a choice by them, because I think it’s only required in California and I’m not there. The last company I worked for was based out of Cali, did not have that OT policy, and only 2 weeks PTO and 1 week sick time. So I’m only speaking anecdotally but from what I’ve seen, European companies take better care of their people, even when not legally mandated
I think approximately 30 days off is pretty much standard in the developed world, with 23-27 of those being whenever and 3-7 being fixed public holidays (nyd, Christmas etc)
Applies the other way as well: A decade ago ended up not signing the contract after initially accepting the position at a major US chip makers EU office - with managers in the US - as it became clear during the process to get to that point there’ll be cultural compatibility issue for my spoiled EU citizen ass, even though the office was in the EU, and they’re forced to follow our labour laws.
Creativity takes inspiration. Somebody has to manifest the stepping stones on the path to a masterpiece. The magic of the internet is we get to watch it happen. We’ll rarely hear Beethoven’s garbage or see Michelangelo’s screw ups, but whoever did this…we get to see the stepping stone.
Turns out being the sort of person who -specifically- doesn’t want to deal with any of the responsibility even tangentially related to kids also isn’t well suited for the responsibilities of a regular 40hr/wk year round job… or being an independent adult at all really.
(It’s me and literally nobody else I’m speaking about above, just for the record)
It’s sobering to think that those of us with this mindset would have had kids anyway if we were born a few decades earlier. Society all but coerced everyone to marry someone of the opposite sex and reproduce regardless of their wishes.
I mean education does wonders for getting people to realize this about themselves, which is why educated women tend to have fewer children, and why a lot of cultures (globally, including many cultures in the US) discourage education either specifically for women or for people in general.
The next generation of broken people, raised by broken parents, are great wage slaves. Always have been, which is why we have child labor laws. But it happens even now, globally. Hell the US recently lost abortion rights federally, and many states are rolling back child labor laws as much as they can.
Personally I probably wouldn’t have had kids anyway because it’s a fucking chore to be intimate with another human I’d rather not touch (I’d 100% be an herbalist or spinster. The two major money-making professions allowed to unwed childless women in history other than prostitution, which… I would just be bad at because I don’t like physical contact with other humans).
Buuuuuut.
Also no. Herbalists were providing abortive herbal mixes for centuries. Babies that were disabled or deformed were often killed or left to die. Contraceptives, even when likely to cause infection or death, were attempted. Women have been trying like hell to manage their family size for all of human history. We have records from. iirc, Mesopotamia about it. Like it’s always been a thing.
It didn’t always work, but it also, importantly, wasn’t socially frowned upon in the same way it is now for your baby to just die. It happened all the time.
Not really, no. Frankly the whole thing is a major point of frustration for me and nothing but fixing it is going to make it better. I don’t have the power to do that myself, but I am obnoxiously loud. That’s what I can do.
That’s a stretch, and maybe true for you, but the world is full of people, such as you described, that haven’t got that issue. Not wanting kids doesn’t automatically make you bad with responsibilities.
It only makes you a person that doesn’t want kids.
Literally said in the comment you replied to that I was talking about myself and nobody else (and it was never edited) so not sure why you responded with this.
Righteous indignation a fit of pique will do that, and I’ve been guilty in the past of the same.
No worries. I’m not painting with a broad brush, I’m recognizing myself in a way the others relate to :)
Have a great morning/day/afternoon/evening/night, depending where you are :D
Edit - I didn’t realize that righteous indignation has a specific religious meaning. I was aiming for less religious and more just sort of …defending the downtrodden. Is there a better word for that?
Edit 2: I learned strikethrough for this edit and it worked!!
“But just wait, try buying a house as a single working class person! Not fucking happening! Try again once you marry someone who also works 40 hours and you might have a chance! But you might need to rent out one of the bedrooms to some poor single sap! Hahaha!” - the system
Capitalism abhors a single man. I feel like my no kids and 3 money lifestyle is basically discriminated against nowadays.
You’ve described me as well, I’ve just managed to luck into a job with minimal oversight where I mostly get to do what I want. I couldn’t handle a real job at all, no shot.
I just can’t believe how difficult insulin companies make it to have a closed loop system to automatically deliver or stop delivering insulin based on glucose level. I do know that there is open source code on the internet to make that work using a GCM, but it requires an older device, Apple Software, and an understanding of coding that I do not have yet.
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