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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   31877 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 10, 2023

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I spent a distressingly long amount of time thinking that the US and the EU were peers, or that most people can be truly equanimous between them.

Then I saw that an electrician in the US often outearns a UK professor/doctor/senior engineer, owns a bigger house, has more cars, and can enjoy the breadth of half a continent, and a proper continent at that.

So what if the Euros have socialized healthcare? At least in the UK (not EU, I know), the NHS is absolutely swamped and gasping for breadth, with elective surgeries having waitlists months long, and if I wanted to have my ADHD diagnosis ratified, I have to settle for a two year waiting period for an NHS shrink, or spend upwards of 800 GBP like 2rafa said was typical for even a teleconsult from a private consultant.

Everything is smaller, and often just a bit shabbier there. Even I, someone who lives somewhere barely acceptable to modern sensibilities, can clearly see that and plan accordingly.

I hate to break it to you, but I know someone who makes more than a UK starting doctor selling cell phones part time in the US with no degree (~$60k).

That's it, I'm going full Ted. The Industrial Revolution and it's consequences have been pretty great for humanity, it's just that us non-Americans are missing out on the fun :(

Good sales people earn a ton of money everywhere. I had a buddy who made 80k+ 15 years ago working part time selling insurances, while being severely alcoholic.

I had another buddy who worked part time selling fish oil from a stall in the subway who made 50k+.

Don't compare salaried work to commission work.

Come to Albuquerque, New Mexico, where you can make way too much money as a private urgent care doctor seeing new patients daily. No need to Ted out.

I never liked him anyway. I like modernity, and would kill myself living in some tiny ass shack.

If I match into Psych, the pay is certainly not half bad, so I'd have to be in pretty dire straits to consider working in urgent care. Far more stressful, but I know people who thrive in such situations, whereas I'm just gritting my teeth and counting dough.

So what if the Euros have socialized healthcare? At least in the UK (not EU, I know), the NHS is absolutely swamped

I agree with your point generally, but the NHS is a really unfair thing to saddle Europe with. It really is socialised healthcare, and it works as well as communism usually works. Britain is a great place to visit, but don't get sick.

The rest of Europe is better. Germany for instance has normal GPs and also compulsory health insurance a bit similar to Obamacare. That produces some overservicing because everyone is finding ways to milk the insurance companies, but overall that better than the communist underservicing you get in Britain.

The only nation I have any authoritative knowledge on in Europe is the UK, but I get your point.

While I'm fond of the idea of free public healthcare, a country needs to be very wealthy indeed to provide it at a quality equivalent to what you can get from market rates in a private setting. They will need at least an implicit idea of cost-benefit, since there many interventions that work but have 5 or 6 figure price tags. I'm aware the NHS does that, albeit with public pressure often forcing them to accept treatments with terrible returns.

Britain is a great place to visit, but don't get sick.

Or as I'd put it, if you're getting sick, you better aim to be really sick if you want something done about it in a timely manner. Around the point where the ER doctors need to triage you first so their metrics aren't screwed by you dying on their doorstep.

I'm aware the NHS does that, albeit with public pressure often forcing them to accept treatments with terrible returns.

But in practice it is the sin of the American system to overpay for treatments because of what amounts to public pressure (as manipulated by those who stand to profit). The NHS is actually quite good at denying costly treatments, at least by the standards of 1st world healthcare systems.

I could very well be wrong, but I'm under the impression that most of the massive spends come from insurance companies.

Yes, that increases premiums for everyone else, but the US is wealthy enough to take it. I'm unsure what facilities are available to some poor uninsured bastard (literally poor) who catches a particularly unusual type of leukemia and would need 6 figures in treatment with dubious outcomes. Surely the government doesn't foot that bill, and said person dies on the street or in a hospital instead?

If it's people paying out of pocket directly or indirectly through insurers, that's a different matter in my eyes, albeit not that big a difference. At least the Americans break in new techniques and drugs, and the price eventually drops to something cheap enough for the rest of us.

(I agree with your points, this is all additional commentary, and commentary I'm not sure on)

I'm ignorant, but I think hospitals are obligated to treat people?

you better aim to be really sick

But not the sort of really sick where you need a scan to find out that your illness is life threatening.

I have a cousin who only found out about that when she flew back to her 3rd world homeland to get treatment.

Even I, someone who lives somewhere barely acceptable to modern sensibilities, can clearly see that and plan accordingly.

Are you planning to live in the Midwest or in one of the large coastal cities? There are shabby, run-down, neglected, dying on their feet parts of the USA as well.

Everybody wants the life they see in the movies and on TV. Reality is different, be it Europe, Asia or America. The point about absurdly cheap oil prices is part of all that; Americans have cheap energy, and they need it, because of the size of the 'proper' continent and the dependence on cars to get you to work, etc. If you're that electrician, you need the cheap energy to run your house and your cars and your truck and everything else, hence the memes about America going to war for oil. If the people of the US had to pay comparable prices for oil and energy as over here in Europe, there would be huge upheaval, protests, and maybe even a bit of economic collapse. You can live in the hot areas of the country because you have air conditioning, and you can run air conditioning becaue your energy prices are cheap, and your energy prices are cheap because your government ensures they are, and your government ensures they are because your entire economy is built around cheap energy.

All this is not to blame or mock America, just to point out that there's a lot of underpinning the life we see on the surface, just as in other countries. In our own countries, we know what's going on below the surface level. When we look at America, we're looking through the lens of decades of movies creating an image in our minds.

If the people of the US had to pay comparable prices for oil and energy as over here in Europe, there would be huge upheaval, protests, and maybe even a bit of economic collapse

Prior to the Ukraine war, I was under the impression high energy prices were government policy enforced by taxation, no?

Are you planning to live in the Midwest or in one of the large coastal cities? There are shabby, run-down, neglected, dying on their feet parts of the USA as well.

I can hardly afford to be all that picky, especially since I'm hellbent on Psychiatry if I manage to match into it.

In an ideal world, I'd go to the Bay Area and find my fellow rats (and then form an enormous ratking through Aella's orgies), but even if I ended up in one of the more rundown parts of the nation, I expect to have some degree of geographic mobility when I'm done with the residency.

At the end of the day, energy is still cheap there. Why does it matter if things would get worse if it isn't likely? There's no real risk of that that I can see, the fracking boom did great things for domestic oil production.

A great deal of what we consider progress hinges on the availability of massive amounts of energy, and cheaply. The amounts involved have been getting larger and usually cheaper, and a graph of wealth compared to energy consumption is quite linear from what I recall.

It's a massive flex to build a city or golf club in the middle of a desert, and I'm all for humanity telling Nature to go fuck itself, we're here to terraform at scale.

It's a massive flex to build a city or golf club in the middle of a desert, and I'm all for humanity telling Nature to go fuck itself, we're here to terraform at scale.

Well yeah, as long as you have resources to burn. But do we? And it gets to a point where "yippee, I can waste water in the desert" is just showing off for the sake of it. I mean, for those to whom this is impressive, great. But I'd much rather (for instance) that something was done about the coastal erosion on a local road in my locality, which any day now really is going to topple into the sea because the soft earth of the cliffside is being eaten away.

But again, this is not to say that you're wrong or dumb. If the Bay Area is your dream of the Earthly Paradise, I hope you get there one day. Me, I like where I am and even if given a free ticket to the Big Cities wouldn't take it. Each to their own.

Desalination at industrial scale has gone from being a pipedream (heh) to now making Israel a net exporter of water. It's only getting cheaper, and if there's one thing we're not running out of, it's sea water.

Good luck finding a place you like, or saving that path. I don't think my preferences are anything but my own either!

There used to be a meme that if UK was US state it would be third poorest state. I looked at 2021 numbers and with UK's GDP of $46,500 Per Capita (Purchasing Power Parity) it would actually rank as literally the poorest before Mississippi with $47,190 and West Virginia with $53,852. The US GDP is $70,250

Many people talk about welfare state in Europe, but even this ranks hollow mostly because people do not understand that US is 51% richer than UK. So even if USA had half the spending on welfare as percentage of GDP compared to UK, it would still be on par in absolute amount.

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