Americans Are Sharing The "Normal, Everyday" Aspects About The US That Are Actually Dystopian, And I Can't Believe We Tolerate Some Of These
Americans Are Sharing The "Normal, Everyday" Aspects About The US That Are Actually Dystopian, And I Can't Believe We Tolerate Some Of These
"I told my doctor that I wanted my tubes tied. The doctor said, 'You need to think about this more.' It baffles me that our society still doesn't trust women to know their own minds and wants."
"Since I got my first credit card, I used it for all my purchases but paid it in full each month, building a good score — or so I thought. When I went for a car loan, I was denied because I was a 'thin file,' meaning I never paid any interest."
My friend just got denied a mortgage because of this bullshit. Like what the actual fuck!? You're a responsible borrower but you committed the ultimate sin of NOT PAYING THEM INTEREST!
... Like what the fuck?
Yes, it's a real thing. When I worked at a major bank the customers that would pay in full monthly on their cards were considered the "bad" customers. Those that paid only minimum and got hit with late fees were our "good" customers.
This part is true but is separate from credit scoring. Banks don’t like unprofitable credit card customers.
But it’s actually good for your credit, and they’ll keep approving you as long as you’re not churning. Churning can look like the lead up to bust out fraud too
This is weird. They probably only have 1 cc with a very low credit limit that doesn't let create a good picture of how they are managing debt
I've never paid interest but I have 7 credit cards and about $50k in credit. I was able to get 2 loans for cars and I've been offered good mortgage rates
The people doing the car loan see that 50k in available credit as an emergency back up too, so to a point, having credit available can get you more credit. It's also in a ratio with your income too though.
This Experian FAQ article indicates "thin file" is about number of credit accounts, not amount of interest.
Yes. Credit score is simply how much you borrow and how often you repay it. The thinking is that, with a thicker file (more accounts paid), there’s less risk.
This can cause some real fuckery: they want to see different types of loans, so student loans with no missed payments is good for your credit despite being bad for your life. It doesn’t care if there’s interest. The misconception may occur because with almost every type of loan, there is interest.
I’ve been fortunate enough to never need a loan and my credit did slightly suffer because of that. That said, any 18 year old can open a starter credit card and get a score of >700 within the year as long as they don’t miss a payment.
They want a profitable client. So yeah they basically want you to pay an invisible premium for your credit score. I routinely carry a small balance over and my credit rating is far better than people who pay everything off right away. They want a reliable profit, not a reliable payer, if it makes more sense that way. Think of it like your subscription to credit. It doesn't need to be a large amount either, literally just a couple dollars a month when you math it out.
This is incorrect, of course. Anyone reading this thread, please do not pay interest for nothing.
First, let me say this is not a defense of the credit score system which is unethical. I hate it too, but for the real reasons.
Credit score is not determined by the bank. Your lines of credit report to an agency which considers your utilization but not whether you pay interest. Credit agencies don’t care if banks profit, they are already making money by collecting your personal data and selling it.
I have never paid a cent of interest and do not have anything but credit cards on my file. My score is above 800. I hate to say it, but Lemmy has been consistently worse than Reddit for financial advice, and I’d suggest visiting the cRedit sub for accurate hate on the credit system.
building a good score
"Being a good slave"
I was curious about the adoption thing and didn't wanna just weigh in on vibes, so I took 5 seconds to search it and yall...
Some of this is bleak.
https://time.com/6051811/private-adoption-america/
Anne Moody, author of the 2018 book The Children Money Can Buy, about foster care and adoption, says the system can amount to “basically producing babies for money.”
Claudia Corrigan D’Arcy, a birth-parent advocate and birth mother who blogs extensively about adoption, says she routinely hears of women facing expense-repayment pressures. Some states, such as California and Nevada, explicitly consider birth-parent expenses an “act of charity” that birth parents don’t have to pay back. In other states, though, nothing prohibits adoption entities from trying to obligate birth parents to repay expenses when a match fails.
Yes, there are some VERY disturbing adoption systems here. Particularly in the south, the prolife/fake abortion clinics will guilt trip women into giving up their kid for adoption to an agency they work with. That agency ONLY allows Christian families to adopt (often white only) even though they take children from any religious background. These families adopt at around $20,000 per kid or higher. The original birth mom MIGHT get her birth paid for. The adopting parents can choose to back out at any time.
I became aware of this when Cameron Robbins was in the news for being eaten by a shark. He was adopted through one of these agencies. I wondered how his birth mom felt when they decided to cover up his death.
If our government can pay foster families direct sums for keeping their kids, they should just pay it to the bioparents. Yes fostering can have a place at times, but the way it's done here is barbaric and akin to trafficking and slavery.
Doesn't pledging allegiance to a piece of colored fabric count as "worshipping a false idol?"
You know... considering they've got that whole ten commandment thing coming and all.
It's also not required on a daily basis, or even at all. Haven't actually said the pledge since grade school.
Yeah it's hard to force adults to do mindless cult shit. But it's completely normal to force that on kids.
13."The working class being gaslit by the 1% to blame the rest of the working class for all of their problems. The amount of people I see thinking their tax dollars are paying for student loan forgiveness, social security, WIC, Medicaid, or welfare is just so ridiculous. You can literally look up exactly where your tax dollars are going. It's not 'fake news;' it's readily available.
This one drives so many of the other problems. I constantly hear (mostly from my conservative neighbors) about how we shouldn't be spending so much of our tax dollars on various programs. One of my neighbors was recently complaining about paying for school bus drivers.
Here's a chart showing where your taxes go.
Wanna know what's the most ridiculous about it? That chunk going towards healthcare is for a minority of the population. The US ends up paying more per capita than any other country to cover a minority!
This is some garbage. Adoption is NOT buying and selling children. I mean, I guess that happens under the guise of adoption. But tons of kids in foster care need permanent homes and loving families, and their biological family is not an option for any number of reasons. It is a tragedy that this happens, but fuck off with this narrative that adoption is buying and selling kids. Tons of other shit in there was bogus too. Fuck this article.
I'd imagine they were meaning to refer to the practice of foster "parents" signing up to take in kids in order to receive money money every month that they use mostly as personal income for themselves while neglecting the kid. Cuz yeah, adoption is very different.
Yeah, that was a super weird inclusion.
Now, propublica did a great multipart series on people actually selling and buying children on Craigslist and Facebook. Foster parents take kids in for the money, then shuffle them off to basically predators. Not basically, they were almost all predators. Just by getting in touch with them via email after finding each other on Craigslist or Facebook groups. These kids were just driven sometimes hundreds of miles and dropped off with someone entirely unknown in a Walmart parking lot.
It was horrifying, but I can’t find the article anymore. I could’ve sworn it was propublica, but now I’m second guessing that, unless they had to take it down, maybe by claims from meta.
Women's circles, usually connected to lesbian and witchy communities will keep track of doctors who will perform tubal ligations or other sterilization techniques on demand, because it is so common for doctors to refuse women's personal choices about fertility.
And every time there's a big policy event that threatens family planning and reproductive rights, another bloc of women go for appointments to seek long-term and permanent contraception, because pregnancy is too much of a liability to leave up to chance, especially in anti-abortion states which have little to no maternity services either (all the OBGYNs closed shop and left).
5."Buying and selling children — aka adoption."
I mean...Then what should we be doing? Just leave those kids to the streets/Foster homes? And I'm pretty sure other countries have adoption. I'm probably just uninformed, but I have no idea what the alternative should be.
(I understand if our current procedure needs refining, but I don't see why adoption is inherently bad)
Edit: I had no idea other countries didn't have to pay for adoption, I thought was was the norm and thought they were talking about process. Guess I'm the example of what the article was talking about.
not a lawyer or an expert but a quick Google seems to indicate in the US you have to pay to adopt a child, whereas I believe it's free / you get paid in European countries.
I'm in Canada, but much of the cost of adoption is the same.
- Legal fees to change the parentage (and sometimes the name) of anchild.
- Counselling for the birth parents.
- Travel costs for the birth parents.
- Background checks for the adoptive parents (legal, medical, and financial).
- Counselling/social work for the adoptive parents.
- Payment to the adoption agency for facilitating the whole process.
The only significant difference I know of in the US is that some ahencies are for-profit, and medical costs aren't covered by unicersal healthcare, so have to be added on.
"Edit: I had no idea... I thought it was the norm"
Thanks for confirming the article 😁
I'm not super familiar with adoption but I'm pretty sure there's no buying/selling going on. There are costs with adopting a child but those are costs for the process, not the child itself.
And the credit rating one I can certainly get behind but some of it sounds like BS. I've never paid interest on credit cards and my rating was good enough to get the best possible rate when I purchased my home. There was quite a significant time between the start of my credit history and the purchasing of my home. At least 15 years. My credit rating hasn't changed significantly in years though.
And the credit rating one I can certainly get behind but some of it sounds like BS
It is. There's no change to your credit rating or report over whether or not you paid interest. It's not even a reported statistic. At best, you could argue that if they see the credit utilization is low and your payments are always on time that you probably don't pay a lot of interest, but that is a typical indication of good credit.
It's more likely that they had one credit card and not that long of a credit history with it.
One credit card. Low credit limit. No loans ever. All the lender sees is a responsible poor person.
Good thing your personal experience is the exact same as everyone else's right?
I mean, I don't think the credit agency is treating me different, so yea. In this case it really should be.
6."Dental work is astronomical, even with insurance. Yeah, cleanings are free, but if you ever need anything more than a filling, it's just not something that can be budgeted for. Due to having a now-overcome addiction, my husband needs pretty much all of his teeth removed and replaced, but we barely live paycheck-to-paycheck as it is. I hate that he has to live like this and that people see him with missing teeth. He did the hard work quitting his addiction, but his confidence is basically nonexistent now."
wow, what a dystopia.
i live in a country with quality and affordable medical care and something like that would not be free as well here.
good on him for overcoming his addiction, but this is consequence of his own action, not a dystopia.
You went out of your way just to tell everyone that you think former drug addicts aren't deserving of medical care? Not even people who currently do drugs (who are also all 100% deserving of medical treatment btw), anyone who used to do drugs is disqualified, too? It's an absolutely insane take to say "they used to do drugs, so they don't deserve to have teeth." And what of all those people who didn't do drugs, but still need and can't afford dentures or implants? If you can't afford reliable access to dental care from the start, you'll likely be stuck with preventable problems down the line that then become even more expensive to fix. The situations of these people aren't different from former addicts in any meaningful way; they need dental work, but can't afford it. You're ignoring the core issue that important and completely necessary dental work (and medical treatment of all kinds) is too expensive for almost everyone, not just current or former addicts. As a result, many are forced to go without that treatment. That's a bad thing. You saw someone complaining that dental work is unaffordable, and all you could think to say was "Yeah, but they're druggies, so there's no problem here." You've justified a terrible system to yourself because you view the people who were quoted as being beneath you. What's truly dystopian is both that medical care would be out of reach of so many, but also that people would be ok with that as long as it means the "undesirables" don't get to have any. The societal disdain for marginalized human life and the moral superiority complex that fuels it are both absolutely appalling.
You went out of your way just to tell everyone that you think former drug addicts aren’t deserving of medical care?
yeah, no. i said that not receiving it for free is not a dystopia.
and i didn't really go out of my way... as someone who's emotional outburst would make 10 paragraphs, if its author knew how to correctly break the text into them 😆.
but this is consequence of his own action
Yeah, because people choose to do drugs just because, and such choices absolutely exist within a vacuum /s
https://www.psychiatrictimes.com/view/what-does-rat-park-teach-us-about-addiction
Mmmm luxury bones....
Yes, not having teeth is the Lord's punishment, yes.
Not free, not free!
Not been addicted, he should have been, yess.Drug addiction is a disorder most often caused by some sort of pressure to do drugs. It's almost never a path someone chooses to take just because. And, obviously, it takes extremely long and an extremely good set of circumstances to escape, you can't just choose not to have a drug addiction suddenly. "Having a drug addiction some time in the past is his fault so it's not dystopic that he can't get basic healthcare" is an extremely ignorant take.
Should diabetes treatment not be accessible to all because a lot of diabetes is partially caused by lifestyle either? Or rather, is your argument that in a capitalist world – which can't exist without an underclass and people too poor to afford many basic necessities – it's fine that people who can't afford healthcare just get fucked and rack up a bunch of debt from the hospital and (in the case of the US) can't get treatment from doctors/specialists for anything that isn't immediately life-threatening? It's okay for there to be a class of humans "undeserving" of healthcare at all?
I just want to gauge the line for how much healthcare inaccessibility/insecurity there needs to be, or who can be excluded, for you to accept that it's immoral and causes unnecessary human suffering and misery.
Not getting paid maternity/paternity leave unless you work in very specific sectors of the federal government.
Why does this complaint prevail? I get that not all companies offer parental leave, and it’s not government supported like if some other countries, but I have had full-time employment since 2000 and every company I’ve been at offered several (4-12) weeks of maternity leave and at least a week of paternity. Since 2018 or so every company has also started offering more, 2-4 weeks, paternity. And I live in a state that kind of sucks when it comes to worker’s rights.
Either my experience is rather rare, or this complaint is overblown, or people mean something different when they talk about parental leave such as a government sponsored program. Or is there something else I’m not considering?
"I haven't been on minimum wage for a quarter of a century, so I really don't understand why people are making such a fuss about it."
US ranked among worst countries to raise a family, study says
Pay rate and parental leave are very different things though. I didn’t say I hadn’t been on minimum wage, I said I’ve been in full time employment. A significant portion of that time was at it barely above minimum wage of the time and lower than my states minimum wage is today. I’m asking about parental leave, not wages.
4-12 weeks of maternity leave is depressingly low. 2-4 weeks of paternity is insultingly low.
People should be given a year. Paid. It's really impactful for the child and family.
People should be given a year. Paid
Agreed. And they do here in Denmark, by law.
You also have to burn your sick/vacation days for it too most of the time if you plan on getting paid. So, if you require time off to care for your newborn afterward, good luck. We won't even get started on how much child care costs once your CEO decides WFH is not viable. Bottom line, we dint care about you and your baby.
This is just my experience at maybe ten companies, but it was always paid, not using PTO. It was only if you wanted to use more than the allotted time you’d need to start using PTO. Childcare is a whole different level of insane expense that really should be subsidized. When I was too young to consider children, I worked at a call center that had an on site preschool, but that phased out pretty shortly after I started as a cost cutting measure. Nothing has gotten anything but more difficult when it comes to raising kids.
Retail and restaurants are unlikely to give you 4-12 weeks of even unpaid time off. No way would they pay anyone for that much time off unless they were forced to. Not saying this to defend them, but restaurant margins can't absorb that kind of cost unless it's a large non-franchised chain.
What do you think about the system in Mexico? I’m not an expert, just saw in some paperwork that everyone pays a maternity tax, like social security, which makes it seem that maternity leave is a government program. We’d need to get our shit together as a country first as the GOP crowd would immediately want it defunded, but it seems like a better use of tax dollars than weapons of war.
Your experience is rare.
Right wing nut Barry Goldwater warned about this 60 years ago.
Number 1, been there. Got called to the principal's office and strongly encouraged to start again when I was having garbage thrown at me. Why did I stop? The weird jingoism that came over the US after 9/11 creeped me out. Guess who was vindicated when the WMDs were never found and it took a different president sending SpecOps into a different country to finally kill bin Laden.