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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   38744 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 15, 2024

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This is why I always get the bare minimum insurance legally possible. Self-insuring is much simpler; I understand that I am on the hook for anything other than $10,000 worth of damage to other people's stuff, and act accordingly. If their insurance covers me when they total my car, great; if not, or if I am the one that crashes my car, I'll just have to buy another car. It helps that I have never owned a new or expensive car; all my cars have been 10+ years old and worth only a few thousands of dollars on the used market.

But most people are constitutionally incapable of saving money for some reason, so this is not an actionable plan for them.

Similarly, when my job offered me a bunch of different health insurance tiers, I deliberately picked the ones that would deduct the least from my paycheck, on the idea that I probably wouldn't be able to navigate the insurance bureaucracy anyway (I was right; my contract was not renewed, and I barely got a couple of primary visits before my benefits lapsed). I am aware of my own limitations and deliberately try to opt out of interacting with complicated systems whenever possible.

Which is also one of the reasons I have a prepaid phone instead of a monthly phone contract. It's so simple; account balance is near zero or time is expiring means I need to buy another card, same as I buy gas when the tank is empty. What could be simpler than that?

I don't think this makes sense. Good insurance will cover large infrequent expenses, insurance companies have expertise and economies of scale in getting things done, and good health insurance gets you better care than trying to pay your way through the complex healthcare system yourself unless you're quite rich I think

From the perspective of most people, insurance is just another name by which someone else should pay for you.

But most people are constitutionally incapable of saving money for some reason, so this is not an actionable plan for them.

It always cracks me up when five-figure-earning somewhat or very online Westerners complain about things being too expensive when they just must live in high cost of living areas. That they must have furbabies who they spend thousands on each annually. Single mothers complaining about how it’s all so difficult and expensive, especially since men are too shitty to Step-Up.

If only there was some other option than to live in high cost of living areas if you don’t make much money and/or are low in human capital, some way to not have become a pet-owner or single mother…

There’s also the men who complain how expensive vidya is. The women who complain about how expensive makeup, nails, and regular new clothes are (expenses that the patriarchy forces upon them and that the government or someone else should pay for, or at least subsidize, of course).

Can't say I've ever heard/seen a man claim vidya ought to be subsidized. Or women asking for makeup and nail salons to be subsidized for that matter, though I've seen that patriarchy argument. The clothes thing is hilarious because women's clothes are so much cheaper than men's clothes for the same purpose, especially professional clothes, but they rarely talk about that.

I was joking about women wanting the government to pay for those things, but only partially. The "someone else" part was somewhat less joking.

There are quite a few women in spaces like /r/aitah who will argue that a husband/boyfriend WBTA if he doesn't agree with his wife/girlfriend's assertion that her makeup, nails, and clothes should be considered a valid part of the household budget like food, rent/mortgage, and utilities, especially if they each have equal-sized "fun" accounts alongside their household account. Equal pay for equal work isn't fair, because it's just so much more expensive being a woman if she has to pay for her own essential upkeep. A father WBTA if he's not as enthusiastic about paying for his teenage or young adult daughter's make-up and thotty outfits as he is for his teenage or young adult son's sports equipment :jordan_peterson_daughter_question.mp4:

The payment from someone else need not be direct/explicit. I recall a Lived Experience of mine reading an AskaManager letter or comment thread chain where the writer was complaining that her coworker was treating nail (or lash, I forget which, maybe it was both) appointments like medical ones, and would guiltlessly ditch work for hours for her appointments and then return like nothing happened.

There were many sympathetic comments for both the coworker and the OP; the coworker being the victim in having no choice but to use the workday for her nail/lash appointments, and the OP for having to cover for her (in the sense that women have always been the primary victims of women's vanity appointments). I doubt the comments would had been as sympathetic if OP was male (why do you care so much? Her appointments are none of your business, just be a decent person and cover for your coworker), or if the coworker was a man ditching work to play vidya for a few hours.

And thus, in the absence of "someone else," why not the government to fill the gap?

It is kind of a Chadette move to ditch work for your vanity appointments, though. "Leaving for my appointment now, I'll be back when I'm back, be thankful I'm deigning to let you plebs cover for me 💅"

I mean, I've seen feminists ranting about the pink tax- how much more women's hygiene costs. This is usually illustrated with how much more pink razors cost than mens'(reality unisex) razors, despite no functional difference. Never does it seem to occur to them that if there's really no functional difference(I don't know enough about women's razors to say if this is true) just treating the cheapest razor option as unisex is their best option. One suspects that they don't actually care.

There are a substantial number of women who just want you to know how much of the extra mile society(=women) expects from them.

In many countries feminists complain that tampons and pads are taxed at the regular (which is higher) VAT rate, instead of the special (which is lower) one, usually reserved for food and beverages. That toilet paper is also highly taxed doesn't stop their campaign.

When Texas repealed the sales tax on tampons(and sales tax on tampons is at least an actionable complaint, even if reasonable people can disagree with it, unlike most of the 'pink tax' discourse) it also repealed it on diapers, which is an interesting example of consistency on the issue- and not one demanded by feminists.

From the perspective of most people, insurance is just another name by which someone else should pay for you.

Sort of, yes? Back in the day, people had 'informal insurance' from community. If one person's barn burned down, lots of folks in their community would come help them rebuild it, "spending" at least their time to pay for someone else's loss. They community helped, because they thought that "someone else" should "pay" for it, and they were all the "someone else". Financialized insurance formalizes this and abstracts it away from individuals having to spend their own personal time to help someone else who rolled snake eyes, chipping in by a small monetary amount, in exchange for the belief that they will in turn receive the same help if they roll snake eyes.

A big part of the issue is that this formalization and separation from the community aspect, combined with terrible beliefs about redistributive government, caused folks to realize that this is yet another area where if they just control the powers of government, they can free ride and force others to pay for them while giving nothing in return.

High paying jobs are in high cost areas. If you want to participate in this narrow part of the economy (and not spend half your day in a ridiculous commute) you have to shoulder some serious burden.

On top of it, large swathes of these high cost areas are populated by the urban underclasses that decreases your quality of life massively. So avoiding them is another big cost increasing factor.

The five figures I mentioned are not high paying jobs, though.

Total compensation in front office tech and finance jobs is easily well into the six figures for entry-level roles after undergrad, and in many cases (maybe most nowadays) six figures just on salary alone.

Fair, I applied the European salary scale in my head and misjudged the class of people you are targeting. High 5 figure salary easily gets you into 2-3% income percentile or so in most of Western Europe and is only attainable in very expensive cities.

There’s also the men who complain how expensive vidya is.

Skill issue. I have a whole-ass algorithm for getting games on the cheap using Steam. Namely, you may add any game you want to your wishlist. However, you may only BUY the game if the following conditions are met:

  1. The game must be on sale. Steam does so many sales that there is no point to ever buying a game at full price.
  2. The game must be at its lowest price ever. If it was that price once, it will be that price again. You can check a game's lowest price on SteamDB.
  3. The game must be at least 5 years old. This ensures that a game has had time to be patched, had all the DLC released, gone down in price, etc.
  4. The game must be under $19.99. Anything more than that means it's still too expensive.

By following this simple algorithm, you can usually get games that retailed for $50-$60 brand new a decade or two ago for $5 or less.

A note on bundles: Only buy bundles if every single game on the bundle follows this list. Otherwise, the bundle discount will be more than outweighed by the extra price you will pay on the non-compliant items.

There are a few exceptions for #2 -- there is a small genre of indie games what have never returned to their pre-release pricing, with Minecraft and Factorio being the most famous -- but in turn these are high-variance choices, and many in that genre flop badly. Similarly, while Humble Bundle has gone pretty far downhill recently, you can ocassionally find times where the minimum price on a bundle is under the historical sales price for just a couple of the games.

((Although the latter usually means a lot of the games are trash: cfe the current Astragon bundle, which is technically a price savings if you're just gonna play Bus and Construction simulator... but you're not.))

So you still buy single-player games?

Unfortunately this system has a problem...

Phone contracts specifically, I can't believe people pay $50-100 a month, and don't understand what benefits they could be getting from it.

Usually the newest iPhone. They’re expensive, so only paying 20-30 extra over 2 years generally works well for people, especially those who can’t afford 1000 dollars up front or don’t want to pay the whole shot unless they irreparably break it.

If you’re careful with your stuff this is a non-issue but those people tend more often to have 1000 dollars laying around.

Most credit cards have a 6 or even 12-month zero-interest financing period. Amazon store cards have this.

I sold carrier phones for years. I'm on Mint and buy my phone outright and pay it off over 6 to 12 months, usually buying a ~$500 A-series pixel or Oneplus something-or-other. This is what I tell other people to do. Just about no one does. Instead they buy carrier phones.

buying a ~$500 A-series pixel or Oneplus something-or-other

Or a 400-dollar iPhone SE, which is the phone I recommend to everyone either unwilling or unable to install ad blocking on Android (with a side of "I could do this, but I refuse to be tech support for this person") because iOS is a better experience than Android is under those conditions and the hardware is powerful enough that, unlike Android devices, you'll actually get 7 years out of it.

It honestly shocks me that particular phone isn't what most consumers who want iOS want, but then again, sometimes you have to know enough to ask for it (and the pricing on the latest models, which aren't actually any better than the SE outside of the camera and screen size, is significantly more than the SE making consumers think there's a massive difference between the two even though there really isn't).

You cannot begin to fathom my disdain for apple products. It's a personality-type thing, getting an iPhone would be...caving in. I prefer to have something different from what most people have. Even the Pixel is becoming a smidge too mainstream for me.

Also, I take pictures of wildlife I run into, including extreme close-ups of bugs. Camera matters to me. Also, I don't think it uses USB-C yet. Otherwise I agree with you regarding the SE, but the SE doesn't convey wealth/conformity, so of course most people don't buy it.

Huh, is that only the prime visa, or their regular one? I've been really confused ever since they sent me an updated "prime" card just because I did the 1-month prime trial.

Even knowing it's free money I never took advantage of 0% cards until recently, but it's amazing. I have $5k tools that paid for themselves long before I had to pay for them.

The Amazon Visa (from Chase) offers zero-interest financing for six months on Amazon purchases of at least 50 dollars, and for 12 months on Amazon purchases of at least 250 dollars. (There used to be an 18-month, 500-dollar offer as well, but it seems to have been discontinued.) This isn't quite free money: if you take a financing offer, you do not get the 3-percent cash back (5-percent with Prime) that you would get normally.

The Amazon Visa is not the same as the Amazon Store Card (from Synchrony) and the Amazon Secured Card (ditto). The Store Card and Secured Card offer zero-interest financing for six months on Amazon purchases of at least 50 dollars, for 12 months on Amazon purchases of at least 600 dollars, and for 24 months on "select purchases" at Amazon. The same caveat regarding lost cash back applies to the Store Card.

All information presented above is from this page (except for the 18-month parenthetical, which is from personal experience).

Yeah, I saw the difference between the store cards and the chase visa, but my confusion was with the prime vs non-prime chase card. The only advertised difference is the 5% vs 3% cash back, but that's entirely a function of the prime membership rather than the card itself.

Was very confused why they sent me a new (prime) card in the mail two weeks after my prime trial expired.

I understand that I am on the hook for anything other than $10,000 worth of damage to other people's stuff, and act accordingly.

Even that little insurance shouldn’t be necessary. If I crash into your brand new Porsche, me or my insurance should only have to repay you the price of a used kia – else you owning expensive shit is an externality I have to pay for.

How far does this logic extend? Does you accidentally burning down my """needlessly""" expensive home count as me owning expensive things as an externality foisted onto you? The existence of any other not-minimum-viable-product that I own?

It costs me 350 euros per year to insure other people’s cars, but only 35 euros per year to insure their houses and everything else. So the likelihood of me destroying their house is multiple orders of magnitude lower.

But strictly speaking, yes, any accidental destruction should only be compensated at used discount prices. If you have a working class friend and you let him borrow your luxury watch and he loses it you can’t expect him to repay you full price. But again, insuring this is cheap so I’m not going to die on that hill and claim classist oppression on the basis of 35 euros.

People don't typically burn down other people's houses, accidentally or otherwise. People DO get into car accidents every few years. There's a difference.

Sure. But as a matter of principle, if someone ruins my expensive stuff, should they make me whole or instead give me the minimum viable product as recompense?

I would really prefer to be made whole and am unsympathetic to arguments about me having expensive things being a negative externality on everyone else.

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