g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets
Brian Tiemann
Silicon Valley-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry and political bile.

btman at grotto11 dot com

Read These Too:

InstaPundit
USS Clueless
James Lileks
Little Green Footballs
As the Apple Turns
Entropicana
Cold Fury
Capitalist Lion
Red Letter Day
Eric S. Raymond
Tal G in Jerusalem
Secular Islam
Aziz Poonawalla
Corsair the Rational Pirate
.clue
Ravishing Light
Rosenblog
Cartago Delenda Est

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Monday, April 25, 2005
15:44 - But that's not fair

(top) link
CapLion has a few things to say on the subject of socialized medicine. Money quote:

To address this properly, I really need to start off with a fairly macroscopic view of the issue. It's one that many, many Americans understand, and just about all Canadians, Europeans, and Liberals in general do not: It is not okay to be poor.

Perhaps harsh, but as Cap says, read the rest of it before you start smashing things. And I've gotta say, it comes at a pretty opportune time for me to read it. See, here I am pulling in no fewer than four incomes from two full-time jobs and change (as well as a lot of completely self-driven work over the past several years that's now trickling dividends my way), in which number I count this current breakneck writing project on which I'm working harder and faster than I ever have before in my life (including college), with visions of hazard pay and an impeccable Guy Who Gets Things Done aura shining around me when they think of who'll be able to take on future emergency projects. Sleep? Who needs it? Alaska beckons. Or, failing that, the mortgage payment, which plus expenses adds up to within hundreds of my after-taxes take-home pay.

...And then, as I did a few weekends ago, I go to visit some acquaintances on a bright Saturday in San Francisco. Four of them, living in an absolute pit of an apartment in the middle of the city. Oh, it's a beautiful apartment complex—perched on a high hill, full of gorgeous landscaping—but their unit itself was packed from floor to ceiling with books, used food, knickknacks, and piles of cat crap. Of the four renters, not one had a job. One apparently did some kind of contract work once in a great while, but that hadn't happened in a long time; and so one of them, who told me this with great pride, was the "main breadwinner" by virtue of his skulking down to the bus station to pick up garbage every few days, which he smugly said qualified as enough "community service" to make him eligible for General Assistance, which he was able to convince his worried mother was a "job". Meaning one of my incomes—I don't know, pick one—was being diverted to pay his and his friends' rent.

Boy, what a sucker I am, huh? You work harder than the average, you make more money—but you get taxed harder, like the evil rich person you obviously are. Don't wanna work, and don't mind living in a litterbox? We'll find some bozo with an extra income or so he doesn't need and make him sponsor you.

Oh yeah, and then the guy asked me to "lend" him money, or else they'd get kicked out of the apartment. Like I'd done once before, never to see the money again, needless to say. I tell you, it was all I could do to get to my car before I started yelling and hitting things.

And get a load of this little gem from my Correspondent that I read this morning:

There are also circular problems. Let's say I'm having trouble getting work because of my weight (companies don't want to co-pay my high insurance costs). Losing weight is best with the right foods, which cost too much, which I can't afford, because I don't have the job. Or I need the medical assistance to lose this much weight, and I don't have the health insurance because I don't have the job (and the Republicans have made this one of only two industrial countries which has no national health plan). Or, because I don't have a job, I try to survive on government assistance, but I don't qualify because my car is worth too much money, unless I try to sell it in which case I get only a fraction of its value, and then the government doesn't pay enough to live on, and I can't get work because I don't have a car to get there (and I live in a big city whose public transportation system is both too expensive and unreliable), so I get stuck on government assistance, not being able to eat, so I find a local part-time job that I can walk to, and then they cut back the government assistance, and the combination is even less than what I was making before, so...

Where to begin? Perhaps with the thing about how losing weight requires expensive food. Huh? Funny, everyone I've always talked to seemed to be convinced that losing weight involved buying less food. Or jogging around the block once in a while, which is free. Jared became a matinee idol on six-inch Subways, right? "Results not typical", I know, but give me a break. If only there were magical weight-loss pills slipped into every mailbox by the USPS, like in Canada or Cuba, eh? But of course it's the Republicans' fault that this guy is too fat to work. Do I have that right? God, I'm stupid.

I know, I know—part of being one of those people who takes on way too many projects at once and always seems to come through in a way that makes people applaud and throw money my way is also being the kind of person to never complain or even make any public spectacle of how much work it all involves. You can't be an uncomplaining martyr if you complain. I know I don't have any real problems, and being successful insulates me from even being able to empathize properly with people who do. But you know, sometimes you just read or experience too many things in a day that make you so mad you want to wrench your own head off.

And sometimes you're tempted, because you live in a country where the evil capitalist hospitals would probably be able to sew the damn thing back on for you.


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