The username is the joke.

I’m not putting in more effort than you clowns unless I feel like it lol

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Joined 7 months ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2025

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  • I don’t see people pushing much beyond 40 hours in professional environments. I work in IT and have been exposed to many industries through consulting and long term contracts. Admittedly i’m close to an urban center with fairly high cost of living but that’s where the good jobs are usually. Rural areas / closer to FPL and you start having struggles, but there’s still SNAP and Medicaid.

    I also know someone who has a full time office job making ~130k TC and they also have an almost full time side gig of being a waitress who also does the schedule and hiring (so waitress manager) and she schedules herself for the busy nights, but especially friday/saturday and sports nights. Her top tipping nights can be 1k+, but this is in fairly hcol area. She put three of her kids through college doing this because she can hustle. She sure didn’t start out with this though, like most of us didn’t.

    There’s shitty jobs all over, but if we’re talking anything near median wage (66k in the US) the problems you are talking about largely go away. It’s not hard to find a job to coast at though if that’s your goal… but if you’re working retail or are wait staff and making nothing on your shifts, you should find a better place to work at. Criminal records are usually the only real thing preventing this, otherwise it’s usually a preference or choice. There’s opportunity if you pursue it, but not if you disqualify yourself or limit yourself for personal reasons.



  • You’re a tool and you’re holding up a strawman argument, and you’ve even changed your own story now.

    You started out with:

    This comment is so frustrating 😅

    Which I am sure it is for you. It doesn’t really say anything negative or concrete about china, AT ALL. It makes no claims about china. And you even acknowledge it… but try to stir up some shit without actually finding anything to stir up. It’s like you’re just a propagandist trying to say america bad, which they are for a myriad of reasons, but it’s not because people can’t be admitted to hospitals or they are dying from overwork - which is what I replied to originally.

    😅 one of the only concrete statements you make about Chinese policy is “i cant imagine them handing out free food to anybody”. Literally political criticism based on vibes.

    I didn’t make a “concrete statement” about anything. And you conveniently omitted the first part of the sentence that literally said “I don’t know the food situation in china” didn’t you? Because you’re holding up the imaginary argument of “china doesn’t have even a single food bank” as your strawman argument, and you had no clue either way, because you had to google it, idiot.

    China’s median wage is close to 6k/year. Chile and Uruguay is close to 12k/year. The dominican republic is ~7400/year, and they absolutely do not have any kind of real food assistance program outside of the smallest scope. Chile does have something a lot more substantial, but they make wayyyy more. Given that china is poorer in terms of median wage than any of these, that’s going to be the case for a lot of workers away from wealthy median areas.

    The fact that China is even on the Global Hunger Index site shows that hunger is still a challenge. They are near the top of the chart with many of the latin american countries i’ve listed. Globally hunger has been much less of a problem in the past 10 years than ever before, only in truly troubled countries do you find horrific levels, like in Haiti or Somalia - and nobody is saying china is anything like those in the overwhelming majority of the country. Not having food banks is way less than mass food insecurity… it’s the missing gap between healthy income levels and

    China does have a dibao system for an extremely area by area “basic income” where they give people a pittance per month that can partially subsidize what they have, but there’s no real federal style food assistance beyond that. China spends more money on food than any other category in rural areas by a huge margin, and you don’t need to take my word for it. You can check the PRC’s own statistics instead of “googling it” like an ignorant moron.

    • Overall Median income is ~41k yuan or ~5,900. About 1.4 billion people in total.

    • Urban Median income is ~54k yuan or ~$7,800. This is about 952 million people.

    • Rural Median Income is only ~23k yuan or ~$3,300 or so. This is about 452 million people.

    That rural amount is despairingly low and since it’s median half of the people in rural areas make less…this is unbelievably below poverty level in so many countries around the world. Food insecurity must be a major challenge in rural areas since with that kind of income food costs become paramount to all others.

    The statistics I linked from the CCCP also call out rural spending on “food, tobacco and liquor” because clearly food is in the same category as getting lung cancer sticks and fucking your body up with booze (priorities right) and that comes out to 6226 yuan, or just shy of $900 a year. When ~32% of your income is going to just food, smokes and booze, losing a job puts you in dire straits. In poorer rural areas the “basic income” from dibao is only 200($28) to 300($43) yuan a month, and you still need to have clothes, a place to live, etc. 3600 yuan ($519/year) - I think everyone knows this isn’t going to be nearly enough.

    There’s no way food banks originating from extremely wealthy urban areas ten years ago are suddenly reaching the majority of Chinese. It’s not even a state sponsored thing (yay communism, helping the people!) I still have substantial doubt as to how much food assistance there is even in many urban areas, because I know how tough food tends to be when money is tight in countries that are generally poor (but not troubled like Haiti.) Food assistance programs can only subsidize a small portion, as we see with SNAP in the US. Wait… snap is the american government food assistance program? Who are the communists again?



  • “Wealthy” white american here, child of a single parent. Third generation in the US. I went to work with said parent or family and was offloaded to childcare at YMCA or relatives or often just hanging out at the pizza place where said parent worked. I made a lot of pizza boxes over the years. I also got a lot of free pizza.

    I rode the bus to school because it was cheap throughout childhood until basically high school when I could walk from my house. There were periods I walked to and from school though, even as young as 7 years old. I was most often one of the poorest families in an incredibly wealthy town. A town I can’t possibly afford to buy a home in today despite having a great job.

    I didn’t have hot water in one of the houses I grew up in for over a decade. Never had to boil water though thankfully but one of the neighboring towns had a catastrophe ruining their water supply. Before I was born, my family lived in that town. We had an AC by the time I was a teenager but was instructed to never put it below ~78f with low fan speed or so. I’m totally fine today without AC and just fans… but once I got a good career I swapped to whatever AC temp I wanted, it’s the luxury I always wanted.

    Modern QOL in the US is absolutely insane compared to 40 years ago, even with current difficult economy challenges.

    When I travel I see conditions way worse than what we had then for most humans, but i’m not traveling to wealthy nations typically. I also don’t bother with shitty expensive resorts. Give me Lima any day (oh my god the food, best in the world imo.)


  • Regarding AC

    Well, not unheard of, but the way you over there use it is. Slight correction - yes. Turning it full on to have temperature 10 Celsius degrees lower than on the outside - no.

    I said half of the world, which is completely accurate. It is completely unheard of for a huge swath of humanity. The energy costs are INSANE to run a heat pump in 2026 prices outside of the wealthy elite globally. Let’s arbitrarily say top 10% or so of earners, which is something between 35k and 47k… hardly a princely sum in the US, given that the US median is something like 62k.

    There are places in latin america that have air conditioning, obviously. It’s exceptionally uncommon based on my firsthand experience though outside of tourist areas like hotels and high end restaurants. There are wealthy areas in nearly every country on earth that are exceptions to the rule.



  • Nowhere near the same.

    Labor protection laws are basically shit and have largely been eroding since FDR almost a hundred years ago, but we don’t have the 996 mentality here by a long shot.

    Food pantries are everywhere. It’s not like latin america where starvation is much of an issue almost everywhere if you don’t have a job. No idea how the food situation is in China, but I can’t imagine them handing out free food to anybody.

    ERs accept everyone, but all they can do is basic treatment of acute conditions. In civilized states like Massachusetts they have state sponsored health insurance like MassHealth which covers costs which is partially paid for by medicaid for the poorest people of any age.

    Medical debt is incredibly hard to collect on too. Pretty much is the last kind of debt you should ever consider paying if your choice is between paying your mortgage, paying the tax man, or paying medical. Education debt is far worse and impossible to escape short of death though.

    The healthcare situation is fucked in the US, but it’s mostly due to insurance companies, lack of regulation for pharma and medical devices, and wages overall.

    In terms of jobs, it’s very rare in the US to see companies who want to see workers there over 40 hours a week in the shittiest of jobs which are typically paid hourly and eligible for overtime. In the blue collar world you make bank and they incentivize extra overtime with extra pay on top of overtime rate in the busy seasons depending on trade. In the white collar world it is rare to see anyone working much over 45 hours outside of a handful of toxic roles and upper leadership positions / highly compensated roles like management consulting.

    Americans just don’t understand how good they have it, despite all the awful flaws thanks to billionaires owning politics. Yeah, it can definitely be better and we should ask for better… but when you start looking at the rest of the world, the overwhelming majority can’t comprehend our quality of life. Air conditioning? practically unheard of for more than half the world mostly living much closer to the equator where heat is literally killing people.





  • I have thought about the thor or whatever vita looking thing they have but the reality is that I probably wouldn’t do a ton of emulation right now. These devices look cool as hell, but I don’t need more tech ewaste/paperweights.

    I have a deck and hardly use it when I go anywhere because being an adult is a shitload of responsibility and relationship work… and next to no time alone where I can game in peace. lol

    If I still had a subway/train commute or I was still a bachelor in my 20s or 30s it would be another story though. Deck is way too big for the subway, but the thor is basically just a 3DS. I used a 3ds/vita/ds for over a decade almost daily because of my commute.




  • Four hundred bucks for 8gb of ram, three face plates, the upgraded uber slow processor and 128gb of storage. 3.92” amoled screen.

    Four fifty for an ayn Thor with 16gb of ram, 1tb nvme. 6” amoled screen and 3.92” bottom amoled screen.

    That’s how I escaped the marketing. Pricing and specs. If your primary use case is just gaming and not a very low power handheld PC, it’s just not good.

    A $90 miyoo mini plus 128gb is just fine for small portable handheld emulator too. Sold on Amazon and not a kickstarter fantasy that could take years. I’m sure there’s many other better options.

    These things don’t have feature parity. They don’t do all the same things. They are however way better at what they do.