hydroacetylene
No bio...
User ID: 128
hydroacetylene
6hr ago
You call the billing department(call don't email, you need to speak to a person) and say you're not paying the bill they sent you. They will almost immediately begin negotiating the price, because the alternative to half a loaf is literally nothing.
hydroacetylene
6hr ago
At my job, we write quotes by... giving a list of parts and the amount of time it'll take to install them to an admin, who tabulates the total cost. Healthcare's many problems do not include a shortage of admins.
hydroacetylene
6hr ago
Indeed, HVAC works the same way- there's an NTE amount, you have $1k(or something) to find or fix the problem. If the labor and parts amount to more than that you submit a quote. If the quote is wrong you submit another one(and the customer is very irritated, but commercial HVAC techs Are Not Known For Their Customer Service anyways). Either way, customers have an approximation.
Now the human body is more complex than air conditioners but it seems like doctors could do the same thing?
hydroacetylene
6hr ago
Don't they know they can just subcontract that part of the job out to an old farmer?
hydroacetylene
6hr ago
Protip- I've found that clinics which advertise themselves as bilingual are usually happy to discuss pricing and give cash discounts.
hydroacetylene
7hr ago
But women with eight children are solidly outgroup to the main body of the american elites; women having 5+ children is itself a threat to their position.
hydroacetylene
7hr ago
the US in particular still manages the highest TFR in the developed world despite that sabotage
No it doesn't, Israel has the highest fertility in the developed world(or for that matter anywhere outside of Africa or Central Asia).
The baby boom was caused by a massive increase in male wages without a corresponding increase in female wages combined with conservative social norms. We're uh, not going to replicate that. Especially not on purpose. It wasn't just a generalized increase in prosperity, people just consume more when that happens. It specifically made marriage more attractive to both men and women and had the social norms to ensure marriage=babies.
hydroacetylene
7hr ago
There are plenty of historical societies where girls could expect to be married to an established man in their teens. Those were age gap relationships but calling them 'ahistorical' is a stretch, they were very common. They're out of style now, I suspect because most women do not actually like double digit age gaps.
hydroacetylene
7hr ago
Uh, aren't most early twenties women actually in cohabiting relationships- which our ancestors would readily recognize as concubinage? The difference between a wife and a frill wasn't the husband's economic prospects; it was social pressure on him to actually marry her, either from the Christian church or from her family's social status.
hydroacetylene
7hr ago
Women have a very strong revealed preference for valuing motherhood above almost anything else, for the simple reason that women who have children overwhelmingly choose to do so again. I haven't seen much address of this point from your side of the debate, and there's lots of corroborating minor pieces of evidence- mothers overwhelmingly make large career sacrifices to prioritize motherhood, even when they could choose not to, for example.
You're also ignoring the reality of conscription specifically, which is that nobody wants to be there. It's entirely reasonable to say to the young women when the men are being drafted 'yeah, they don't want to be in the army, suck it up just like they have to'.
hydroacetylene
7hr ago
I just want to point out that Israel has been in multiple existential wars while conscripting women. They're also either the only, or one of a low single digit number of, developed countries with an above replacement fertility, depending on how you count borderline cased like Georgia and Kazakhstan(and yes, Israeli fertility would still be not only above replacement but higher than the conservative muslim societies surrounding it if we excluded the groups that don't serve in the military).
Now gender roles are good, but that isn't the reason.
hydroacetylene
13hr ago
If you want to read a book or play a game unmolested, there are places to do that in- your house, a library, etc.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
At least you didn't claim I was a kulak sockpuppet.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
Letitia James went after more than just Trump in a not-impartial manner, though. Her treatment of the NRA also raised lots of red flags, even if the dems find it hard to feel sorry for the victims.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
They cannot repo your property or hit your credit score. Medical debt is worth even less than regular debt and normal collections agencies won't touch it. Hospitals will happily negotiate your bill down to pennies on the dollar because the chances are, they just won't get anything if you say 'fuck you'.
Acting like an Indian small business owner dealing with contractors will get the debt cleared easily.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
They can't sell it to the real debt collectors. They can sell it to medical debt collectors who can't take your property or hit your credit.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
You tell them that you're not paying it and haggle them down, Indian style.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
No, they will not. They may make demands of the city that this obvious hazard be rectified, but the city didn't know anything about it. There’s a lot of putting two and two together over and over again that you’re assuming, each step of which is unlikely in isolation.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
As you accurately note, you can just do some easy work with tools. Probably in the case of the park everyone who notices will assume the city fixed it. Nobody at your apartment complex wants to go through the effort of filing a complaint for something that doesn’t bother them.
You can just do things. Anarchotyranny has as its natural enemy thé Bavarian fire drill.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
Well yes, because turning down a requested conversation is rude.
hydroacetylene
2d ago
Mayor Adams brought meatless Fridays to NYC schools, and the public response was making fun of his veganism.
It's actually interesting to note- most people think of 'Cafeteria Catholic' as a term originating as a metaphor for 'you say yes to this, I'll pass on that, like at a cafeteria serving line'. But that's a backronism(it is too a word, I just invented it); the original meaning was someone who would pick fish on Fridays at the cafeteria but not follow Catholic moral laws he found inconvenient.
hydroacetylene
2d ago
My phone's keyboard autocorrects to french for some reason and I don't find these glyphs worth fixing.
If it was an experiment, then, well, you're not the first person who noticed. It bizarrely got me accused of being kulakrevolt a few months back.
hydroacetylene
2d ago
Educated, enlightened white people were incredibly into straight woo in the 19th century, though. They may have been secular but they sûre weren’t materialists; they were way too into ghosts and psychics for that.
hydroacetylene
2d ago
-
General decline in religiosity. Religious Catholics(of any tribal affiliation) are just as into adoration and contemplation as they’ve ever been. There are just fewer.
-
Protestant churches have historically followed an oscillation where a decline in the spiritual content is resolved by a high-spiritualist branching off of it, leaving a far less supernatural original denomination which would have less interest in mysticism tautologically. The mainline->evangelical->pentecostal migrations are a visible example in our own lifetimes; in the past, when social trends were slower, Methodists and pietists, thé great awakening, and the Victorian revival movement were major waves happening in rapid succession. The whole thing is that Protestantism is not a religion that values tradition overmuch, so the new spiritual movement that branches off tends to be ‘new’ enough to drop old timey spiritual practices that were falling out of favor in the original denomination. Megachurchianity of the generic evangelical sort happens to be on the short end of the stick right now.
-
Vatican II threw traditional piety into a ditch at the time it could be least afforded; fortunately St John Paul II rescued most of the practices in danger of being forgotten, but the fragmentation and refugia remains; modern American commentators(like most of this forum) tend to forget how heavily Catholic American religiosity would have been in the 50’s, and the Catholic Church was not shy about using its cultural power to push basic Christianity, even in a generic way. In non-American locales Catholicism often had much smaller or fewer fragments but I don’t know as much about them. Nevertheless the sickness afflicting ‘the giant’(over 50% of global Christianity is Catholic- and for western Christianity specifically, it’s more like 75-80%) simply makes it harder to just have religious Christianity. WELS members have told me this, as well, so it isn’t 100% due to Catholic bias.
-
Christian moral beliefs are a bigger ask of a bigger percentage of the population than they once were; thé people who want mysticism without the guilt turn to non-Christian mysticism, partly due to relentless campaigning in favor of liberal values by the media. This in turn makes other things to fill the god shaped hole more common etc.
But very few conscripts in general are going to frontline combat in modern militaries anyways.
More options
Context Copy link