Chat Thread

[Our Angry Bear Brain]

My hospital bill was $88,000

Granted it cost me nothing and the insurance will negotiate that down to 40k, still. The surgery itself was 42k.

This is America, have a Cadillac plan or go bankrupt.

[Kashtan]

holy shit lol
america is awesome if youre rich but hell if youre poor.
so do you have to pay anything or not? will insurance kick you out after this? how much is your insurance per month?
i think i pay around 200€ per month for health insurance - its deducted from my wage like pension and other social security shit- and that covers almost everything at least all emergencies and essential stuff. hospital bill is usually just the meals and what you buy for yourself. or if you want a single room or some shit. i dont remember what i had to pay when i ended up in hospital for a few days with my tooth infection sepsis but it wasnt noteworthy. around 100€ perhaps. healthcare system in lithuania isnt top notch like germony or switzerland and my country doesnt spend enough on health (we need a lot for defense). but its improved significantly and even if youre a poorfag they dont let you to die on the streets or put you in debt for the rest of your life.

[Our Angry Bear Brain]

Healthcare is broken here but insurance for Healthcare isn't. If you pay something like $1k or so per month or better, you're mostly ok.

We have things called PPO, HMO and POS then many many lesser plans and you can also get private care that bypasses insurance and you pay the doctor directly but they ain't no way going to cover emergency room visit.

HMO was the standard and it has low deductibles, under $100 usually and they pay for everything. Depending on the type, there are many, they also pay for in network or out of network doctors but that varies wildly.

PPO is a high tier service that sucks if you are doing normal stuff but gets you the best care because they allow everything. Only problem is the deductible is huge, as much as $10k. So having a PPO and HMO is tits. Even a Bear can't afford that.

Then there's POS, basically they nickle and dime you and try to deny shit and basically are a "Piece Of Shit" but waaaaay better than state or gov coverage as they really ream you and still cost over $1000/mo if you make more than minimum wage.

That's all I know. I get good damn insurance and I think it's something like 25k+ per year but I only pay a small portion of that and the employer pays the rest.

So it's like $200 a month but I het full reimbursement on top of that so I technically don't pay for instance at all. Big shot Bear.

They don't kick people out like home and business insurance does.

But as I said, most importantly, I get service fast, like if I had cancer, I'd be treated before leaving the hospital where like Canada you wait. Very low tier plans, you wait pleb. The only thing thay you're fucked if you need is a transplant because there's a waiting list for that.

[Alice]

healthcare system in lithuania isnt top notch like germony or switzerland

Healthcare in Germany is collapsing because middle class has to pay for millions of niggers that contribute nothing. Anyone can apply for asylum and automatically gets access to free healthcare. Also boomers are getting old and young 'Germans' are predominantly brown and useless. So insurance cost is constantly increasing but it's still not enough.

[Τamamo]

Wow that's crazy!
I think we have excellent health care and a very good and well balanced health insurance system here in Singapore that offers affordable payments for everyone from rich to poor and a safety net for those who cannot afford to pay for treatment. There's also private health insurance on top of that for premium services but I work in civil service so I have a special Civil Service Medical Scheme (CSMS) that brings a lot of benefits at low cost and would also cover my wife and kids if I had such. Feels privileged. Yeah, my work is not exactly exciting or challenging but my parents were right.  It's a safe bet.

[Our Angry Bear Brain]

my work is not exactly exciting or challenging

[Τamamo]

I actually tried to make Cat do my work but she has zero interest and thinks office work is boring. The real Cat outside D&D is quite lazy. Damn and I hoped I could relax while my tulpa does my job...

[Our Angry Bear Brain]

Suppose we admit: of course we're living in a multiverse simulation, the double slit experiment clearly and consistently shows that. How can observing a particle or not change it's outcome? How can a single particle interfere with itself? The superposition principal is a model, like dark matter/energy and the big bang, it's a model to explain strange things like a placeholder. The truth is we cannot know the reasoning behind some strange things, others we develop better models for later, some are very consistent so we call it a law.

Then this is a simulation, and not only that, you have power over it. Manifestation is what some call that power over it. Synchronicity is another indication. Combine the two and you are staring at clear evidence but to believe it means you become very disappointed because it's inconsistent so you just call it coincidence and move on, regardless of the evidence.

Tulpamancy is like this for me, things happened that couldn't have happened given the singlet model of the mind. Obviously the mind holds many personality potentials, actors do this as part of their profession, infinite parallel consciousnesses even, summonable on a whim and fluid not discrete.

In the absence of conditioning, there is no static definition of ego, though personality seems more resilient. What we are seems to be not the brain, not the body, not the sum of our experiences and conditioning, that's the ego or the NPC side, the OS or hard coding, but it can be changed by further conditioning, un-conditioning, etc, so what are we? Perhaps a personality, perhaps only a personality, and perhaps that personality was tainted by life and can be cleaned of traumas, and there doesn't have to be only one. Soul or not, I don't care, that's not something you interact with here, we're just apes here, the personality though seems to be something many other animals have along with us. It may be the thing that thing we built from experiences, but preferences seem to be irrespective of experience to some degree. Is that personality above the game? Is it the thing that experiences all simultaneous realities? Is it the part of our higher self we do see?

Imagine we fluidly transition though infinite parallel universes on our whim, traversing as we see fit, living a pathway that's arbitrary through infinite, even locally deterministic, universes. Our free will is that path, cut like a line through a plane, like a plane or surface through a solid, like a cube or three dimensional topography through a hypercube.

What can we do with this? Nothing really, it doesn't matter in the end, all is arbitrary here in my opinion.

[Τamamo]

Whatevver the universe is, it's probably beyond our comprehension. We are only seeing to outer layers. It's still fascinating that it appears to follow simple rules. At least on larger scales. Mostly.

[Alice]

Maybe we're inside a Black Hole, that would explain a lot.
https://www.space.com/astronomy/black-holes/did-our-cosmos-begin-inside-a-black-hole-in-another-universe-new-study-questions-big-bang-theory

[Kashtan]

>we're inside a black hole
wtf man

[Our Angry Bear Brain]

Germans:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_3MZ7cIvdY

Every girl in my grad school:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFhCnJOnlLI

[Τamamo]

You're all weirdos!
Can't you be normal like people here in Singapore?
We ensure that everyone knows their place and everything is nice and orderly. How can Germany even compete?



I don't know about Lithuania. Show me some stereotypes from your country, Kashtan

[Our Angry Bear Brain]

Why american fast food died.

1. The bread is not actually bread:

https://www.npr.org/2020/10/01/919189045/for-subway-a-ruling-not-so-sweet-irish-court-says-its-bread-isnt-bread

"10% sugar constiuent in flour"

https://www.chowhound.com/1698087/chemical-formerly-used-subway-bread/

azodicarbonamide is used in the production of plastics and rubber items, like shoe soles, flip-flops, and foam insulation. This chemical is what gives many of these products elasticity.

2. Pink slime and trimmings of cuts

https://thecounter.org/bpi-pink-slime-ground-beef-usda-reclassifed/

"Amonium hydroxide" and "high levels of purines in offal meat"

https://www.mcdonalds.com/us/en-us/faq/what-kind-of-beef-does-mcdonald-s-use-in-your-burgers.html

"McDonald's uses only 100% pure beef, trimmings of cuts".

"Meat trimmings are the pieces of meat, fat, and connective tissue that are removed when larger cuts of meat are portioned into steaks, roasts, or other specific cuts"

3. The whole frankenchicken McNuggets:

https://www.mcdonalds.com/gb/en-gb/help/faq/what-are-the-ingredients-of-chicken-mcnuggets.html

"chicken meat constitutes 45% of the total Chicken McNugget®"

And they're proud of this!

4. Cheap:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/yourmoney/consumer/article-13387569/mcdonalds-fast-food-prices-inflation-greedflation.html

In 2019, a 12 piece McNugget was $3.49, now it's $6.89 according to sources but at our local McDonald's it's nearly $20 ($15.49) at the window for mcnuggets and a small fry. Yes it's cheaper by a large amount not to get any meal deal.

Subway $15 foot longs... etc.

No thanks. I used to drive bestie to get mcnuggets happy meals for $6 then when she grew out of happy meals suddenly at one point two happy meals witg two small fries and two chocolate milks was cheaper than a single order of mcnuggets. Wtf?

Those nuggets ain't the same nuggets I had as a child, they were discernible chunck of mystery meat, now it's white sponge wrapped in cardboard.

Fast food died for me long before that but there's no helping it.

[Bernd]

People constantly complain or laugh about the EU but when it comes to food quality, laughing quickly stops. You can't pull this shit here, because it's outright illegal.



Even Mc Donalds serves decent quality food here. In contrast to the US, fast food quality has vastly improved in the past 10 years exactly because of EU regulations.
Still I've always found fast food horrible. Not the taste but the surroundings. My INFP mind can't deal with fast food restaurants. It's absolutely plebejan. Cultureless. I don't need anything fancy but a minimum of comfiness in a restaurant would be nice. Driving somewhere and eating in a car or parking lot? Not with me. I remember in grade (not grad!) school, some pleb kid celebrated his birthday, 7 or 8, in a Mc Donalds. I found the idea horrible. I could not comprehend why anyone would do this. The place was ugly as fast food restaurants go. Tiled walls, bad cold neon lightning eating  'food' out of some paper boxes. I still remember almost 40 years later.
I guess it's socialization. Nobody of my family would go there. My parents and grandparents cooked for themselves or we went to a real old-fashioned restaurant. Nothing expensive but still where you ate real food off a plate with knife and fork.

But even in a decent restaurant where you pay 20-30€ for a meal, the ingredients are not bad but not exactly high-tier. Unless you put 50+ on the table, it's industrial mass slop, often from abroad. If a restaurant cooked from domestic organic ingredients, nobody could pay for that.

Therefore I basically always cook for myself. I rarely eat during the day, I eat in the morning and evening. Just made spaghetti with tupper. Consists of organic minced meat, olive oil, garlic, tomatoes, milk, whole grain noodles, spices. All high quality stuff from the local discounter supermarket. The meat 50% off before they throw it away. Tomatoes also were an offer.
500g minced meat, 50% off: 3€
1kg tomatoes: 2€
100g whole grain noodles: 1€
small stuff like garlic, oil  and spices 1€
Even with the enormous rise of food prices, for ~8€ I get 2 full meals of high quality ingredients. With conventional ingredients not from organic farming you could push costs down to something like 6€ or 3€ per meal.

My breakfast is usually something like:
500g organic yogurt, low fat 2€
egg, organic 30ct
fruit: 1€ unless my own
oat flakes, organic: 10ct
linseed: 10ct
ground nuts from garden: free

Tap water is free but some diluted fruit juice doesn't hurt: 50ct per day

Let's round this up to average meal costs of 10€ per day with healthy, mostly organic food. Could you beat that with cheap fast food? Maybe, but your health will suffer greatly.