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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   38814 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 15, 2024

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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...

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