In the wealthiest country on Earth.
In the wealthiest country on Earth.
202 comments
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This happens BECAUSE it's the wealthiest country on earth.
We live in a time of larger wealth disparity than the times of peasants and kings.
The royals were also really wealthy as they said in ignorance "let them eat cake".
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Except that statement wasn't said by royalty, it's a misattributed mistranslation of a snippet from Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions.
It was written 9 years before Marie Antoinette became queen and while she was still a child and had not yet traveled to France.
This is a classic case of the victors writing history. This quote has been used countless times to try to illustrate that the royalty was out of touch (which I'm neither arguing for nor against here,) however there's no evidence it was ever spoken by the Queen - indeed it wasn't attributed to her at all for many years after her death. -
Same thing now.
Some individuals are the wealthiest on earth.
The US shithole has the biggest (unpayable) debt and is the poorest country on earth.
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Why are we so worried about this woman when nobody seems to be worried about the 93 year old billionaire shareholder who won't be able to manipulate global geopolitical events in their final few years? They should be allowed to extract every ounce of value from our society that they bought fair and square . If you don't like the way things are then go buy your own society. Sheesh.
I feel weird submitting this knowing that even extream sarcasm isn't as obvious as it should be here in 2025
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You can't be 'the richest country in the world" if 40% of your citizens are in poverty. The US "gov" is corrupt and greedy. This place truly is a shithole...
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Sire you can , it's called inequality.
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I wish GDP got the same amount of pushback from people that BMI does whenever anyone mentions it
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That claim is ot course being made by the richest people in the country.
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If I were in that position I would do the same. Either they can't evict me or I get sent to prison and I would be kept warm and fed, rather than the streets where I would probably starve or freeze to death.
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They usually just release homeless people charged with petty crimes after the first hearing (24-48 hours) without bail. They can't pay fines, for commissary, phone calls, and all that; or work, so they're not profitable.
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My grandad was told he’d have to give back his electric wheelchair due to some change in insurance.
He was like “let me know what day, so I can have the news here as your tip a 100 year old ww2 veteran out of his wheelchair”
They let him keep the chair.
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i don't know even what insult i wanna use for those people. those are horrible people
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Horrible "people".
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They’re people with a job they need to feed their families. The person who made the call wasn’t the one who made the decision.
I was a GM for a few dollar trees and had to have people kicked out for stealing toothache medicine. I know how bad toothaches can be, I understand they are homeless, but I had a job that needed to feed my family.
The world sucks not the people in it. We are all just slaves to this system we’ve built.
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I bet the people were like "smart alec"
I'm like "you go grandpa show them who's boss"
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He was a tough old man. He had all the patience in the world for us kids but none for adults who should know better.
His mom died in the dust bowl… from dust inhalation. Then he went to Italy to fight facists. Then came home and joined the board of health and helped develop the rabbis vaccine they could put in meat and drop from planes. He’s the reason you never had to worry about getting rabbis in America.
Try he think they’re going to take his wheelchair? Come and take it!
Oh he also had his name legally changed so he wouldn’t be named after Robert E Lee anymore. He wasn’t a fan of slavery. He also wasn’t a fan of baby boomers. Called them “the me me me generation “
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Oh I forget the best story because I just told someone earlier today. He had to pull him out of the nursing home because he kept bullying the younger trump supporters with “ I killed the Nazis once. I can kill them again if I have to”
My dad was a trump supporter up until he died but he voted democrat those years out of respect for my mom’s father.
I swear my grandfather had the presence of dumbledore from harry potter. Like him or don’t but you can’t help but respect him.
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Oh I forget the best story because I just told someone earlier today. We had to pull him out of the nursing home because he kept bullying the younger trump supporters with “ I killed the Nazis once. I can kill them again if I have to”
My dad was a trump supporter up until he died but he voted democrat those years out of respect for my mom’s father.
I swear my grandfather had the presence of dumbledore from harry potter. Like him or don’t but you can’t help but respect him.
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Every single assisted living facility in the United States would do the same thing. They are businesses designed to strip every last bit of wealth before we die, they do not give a shit about their
residentscustomers.-
Yeah but have you ever tried to care for aging parents outside of a retirement community, sucks all your time, money, and energy leaving nothing else for the rest of your family. End of life care is a great place to extract wealth if you're heartless. People are their most scared and vulnerable, they'll pay anything to feel normal for just a little while longer
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Yes, my mother has advanced Parkinson’s and I was her primary caretaker for years before we finally had to move her into assisted living. I know very well how ill-equipped our society is for elder care.
People always talk about how it takes a village to raise a child, but we rarely talk about the village required to care for our elders.
Personally, I would rather kill myself than end up in a facility like my mom is in.
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Checked my mother's facebook and sure enough she's concerned about it. If there's one thing the elderly care about it's their social security checks. She still doesn't understand who is responsible though.
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"refusing to leave"
Where, specifically, did they expect her to go? Being thrown out on the streets at 93 is effectively a death sentence.
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not being able to work is a death sentence in America
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guess the freedom in america is the "works makes you free" variety
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Reminder that socialist countries like Cuba or the USSR have historically de jure and de facto guaranteed employment, with worse economic conditions and over a half century ago. Unemployment is a capitalist construct and we can do better than that.
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The cruelty is the point
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This is what republicans seem to want. Thinking THEY will never be in such a situation so they have nothing to worry about.
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I'd like to say im surprised but im not the yanks really have lost the bloody plot
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The most disturbing part of this is, she made it to 93, and wasn't able to pay rent. Does America have no way to pay their retired and elderly people a living wage at the end of their life?
Like, she's not even just retired, she's elderly. The "Golden years" of wearing a diaper and needing a walker, kind of elderly.
Even if the charges were dropped and she was allowed to go home, the fact that it got to the point where she was hauled off to jail in an orange jumpsuit and cuffs should not have happened. Someone should have stopped and said, "are we really going to try to send a 93 year old to jail?" And that should have been where it stopped. Because that's not something you do to a 93 year old for missing a few rent payments.
America is cracked man. Should not have gotten there. What the actual fuck.
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Yup.
American here.
As far as I can tell we are totally fucked. As in, if I was smart, I'd be finding a way to get citizenship elsewhere before I get too old.
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Social Security was supposed to float them after the time they could make a living. That's drying up faster than water in a desert Nestle is siphoning from.
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Man, I only retired 3 years ago, for medical reasons, and with only just enough money. In that 3 years, essentially everything has doubled in cost. In another 3 years it will probably double again. So, it's pretty easy to see me being in a similar situation eventually, although at least I do own my home. Many retired people on fixed incomes are feeling the squeeze....
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I'm still working and things are getting more expensive faster than I'm getting raises. I don't own a home and doubt I ever will be able to afford it so my only retirement option is a shotgun.
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Even if the charges were dropped and she was allowed to go home
They had her shit on the curb by the time the squad car rolled off.
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Does America have no way to pay their retired and elderly people a living wage at the end of their life?
No. Everytime there is, conservatives cry antichrist and pull Usain Bolt shit trying to get it repealed.
They're about as close as you get to being the literal Sith... outside of North Korea, I guess.
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The people living in America exist solely to serve the needs and wants of the oligarchy. If you're not working to make them more entrenched, you are useless and they would really prefer you just die.
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America is insane.
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I dont understand why you handcuff people who clearly are not a danger to anyone.
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Trigger Warning: Now before anybody comments that I'm evil for this, I'm not saying I would do it, or that I condone it but that I would understand why someone would, and could totally see it becoming an issue. Especially with copycats and such.
That being said I could totally see people getting to the point of hopelessness and going out by suicide by cop, either directly going after police, or whatever mega-corp, or landlord or whatever they perceive to put them in that position. Obviously a 93 year old woman likely doesn't have the strength to pull a trigger but as this inequality issue continues to rise and more and more people are losing hope due to issues outside their control dangerous and scary things are likely to happen. Just like we never solved bullying and it led to school shootings, if we don't solve inequality, I'm afraid that mass shootings are going to go up.
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What you're describing is basically how active shooters are born, including school shooters. And this is also why there are more active shooters in the US than in the next 50+ countries combined.
Inequality leads to crime. A system that exploits citizens at every step leads to active shooters. These phenomena are so well known and documented, it's physically impossible for the current and previous 10 American governments not to be and have been aware of the issue. They must have simply deemed it an acceptable cost.
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Absolutely agreed. But the arms industries are worth more and have more influence than American lives. Including children. We live in the cyberpunk 2077 prequel.
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could totally see it becoming an issue. Especially with copycats and such
What exactly would be the "issue", even if there were "copycats", with everyone having a place to live?
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You're missing the point. If everyone had a place to live comfortably, there wouldn't be the hopelessness that leads to such things. But logically as hopelessness goes up, as does crime, including major crimes. I think you came into this wanting to be mad about what I wrote, and got mad about it despite agreeing with me.
Edit: or you're a troll and intentionally taking the message wrong to start shit.
Edit 2: God damnit. I didn't consider option 3. You're either AI or too stupid to read. Because that response doesn't actually make any sense in context to what I wrote. I hope it's 1 or 2 because 3 is embarassing to me, but seemingly more likely.
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Instead of adventurism and solitary acts a few people have written a manual and described a way of thinking that can fix this
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State spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to chase a nonagenarian out of her home over a four figure rent check.
All so some landlord can afford another wing on the McMansion
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"Hundreds of thousands of dollars" dude, absurd exaggeration doesn't help anyone. an eviction requires a single non-emergency callout, which in flordia costs around $2500 (evictions are usually categorized as property crime)
Legal filings are covered by the landlord and are significantly more expensive (numbers I am seeing for florida are hovering around $5000, but like all things legal it varies wildly). This was disgusting, but the state isn't paying out orders of magnitude more than the loss just to protect some random landlord.
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Completely off topic, but had to look up what a nonagenarian is, and what a useless word. Who decided we needed such a long word to say "in their 90s"
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No one made it up explicitly, it just follows the formula for the rest of the decade age words like octagenarian
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You got a problem with it? What are you, some kind of trenagenarian?
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Completely off topic, but had to look up what a teenager is, and what a useless word. Who decided we needed such a long word to say "in their teens"
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"Who decided" – like most word constructions, it probably wasn't consciously decided upon by a single person but rather evolved out of existing phrases.
In this case, the Latin root nona- for ninth was extended with the -gin- / -gen- infix used for multiples of ten (viginti = 20, triginta = 30 and so on) to form the root nonaginti / nonageni for ninety / "per ninety". The infix -ari- indicates an adjective/description (nonagenarius = "having ninety"), with the suffix -an indicating a representative noun.
Together, nonagenarian refers to "someone with ninety of something" as a logical composition of existing language elements, all of which you'll find elsewhere too. It will probably have evolved naturally by people slapping on parts to describe something and others picking it up because it made sense. From there, it made its way into English as Latin words tend to.
If anything, we ought to appreciate that the "years" part of that composition is omitted, lest we would need to include something related to anni, maybe nonagenanniarian which would be even longer and more complex.
As to why people use it: Sometimes, a single descriptive noun or adjective is less ambiguous that multi-word structures. Sometimes, people want to mix up how they refer to things and use different words. Sometimes, people just want to sound erudite.
And sometimes, people pick up speech habits without much thinking about it, because they're used to people understanding it. You didn't, but congratulations: you learned a new word!
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The Romans did or at least they created the base word structures. Primus, secundus, tertius, quartus, et cetera could all be compounded with the suffix genarian to create an age bracket specific word. For example I am a secundagenarian.
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mcmansion is crazy
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It's a whole thing https://mcmansionhell.com/
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It's funny how the person commenting is still saying unable to work as an argument. In what word a 93 able to work should be expected to... work?
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I think they mean it more in the sense of "this lack of money at 93 is not the fault of the individual as there is no means for them to continue to bring in income" not "put her in the mines'
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She's too disabled to work in the coal mines. Otherwise she could do some 10 hour shifts and maybe afford a living with food stamps
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But being poor is a crime! She could have invested in crypto and gotten rich off of dumping it, but noooooo!
She had to "RrTiRe" and "EnJoY hEr wInTeR YeArS". Lazy layabout. She'll learn the value of HARDWORK once she's making license plates, and maybe then she can pull herself up by her bootstraps by investing those $2 a day and earning her keep in about- oh, say a 100 years?
People live to be 200, right? I don't know, I'm not good with numbers.
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This is Jesus way of saying it's her time.
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Being Heartless is the de-facto standard in capitalism.
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So you mean they will house her only in a more expensive and more dehumanizing way.
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"heartless animals"
This is basically how I view the United States at this point.
I am American.
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How do you even live with yourself if you've been a part of those proceedings?
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I'd bet you hear a variation of, "just following orders."
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How they live with themselves:
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Delusion
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Kinda sounds like a win-win for her when you think about it. The state isn't gonna stick her in high security prison, more like minimum security, so it's basically just a retirement home but this time she doesn't have to pay rent, and under the 8th amendment, prisons in the US are required to provide medical care to inmates (it's not always the best care, but they do get it), which isn't actually the case with poorly funded or greedy retirement homes.
There comes a point when you're old enough that going to prison is actually a better alternative to retirement homes, because a retirement home will actually take your assets so you have no wealth to pass down to your kids, but a prison doesn't do that. if you go into prison as an elderly person, your house is still yours, your bank accounts are still yours, you just can't access them while you're in prison.
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if prisons weren't so inhumane and degrading
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More to that story.. Turns out charges were dropped within days.
Notice the part where she said she stopped paying rent because she thought she was going to die, and later when she was offered money, said she didn't need it and would likely give away the donations and just wanted her bible..
Hmmm.
Always look up the stories behind the memes. They might not really be about what you think they are.
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There's a bunch of articles with conflicting details. It does look like the facility tried a few different avenues before evicting her, but I haven’t seen a report mentioning involvement from a healthcare professional trained to handle situations like this. Every article does make it sound like that’s exactly what she needed though. It’s also entirely possible that when she said she thought she was going to die soon, she was referring to the potential mold issue she had been complaining about. I don’t think the article you linked mentions anything about that. I could be wrong though since I read a few.
There’s also this quote from another article:
Ms Fitzgerald, who was interviewed in jail while dressed in an orange jumpsuit, tearfully refuted the claims. Asked about why she would not pay the rent, the woman, who was handcuffed and appeared to have bruises up her arms, said of a housing facility employee: “She wouldn't take it, that woman blamed me for the mould.” She added: “I paid my September rent and when she decided she was going to put me out, she wouldn't accept any rent after that.”
The truth is probably somewhere between the two accounts. But honestly, that’s beside the point. Even if the living facility's version was completely accurate, a 93 year old woman should not have ended up bruised and dragged out of her home by police just because she withheld rent for two months and refused to follow an order to vacate. Full stop.
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Oh, I don't disagree with you on that. She did apparently find permanent housing and I looked all over the place for later news on her like an obit or anything, actually.. so I can only assume she's still kicking somewhere and is now 100.
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Like a 94 old person isn't quite there any more and doesn't know how to deal with labyrinthine bureaucratic processes?
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Notice the part where she said she stopped paying rent because she thought she was going to die, and later when she was offered money, said she didn’t need it and would likely give away the donations and just wanted her bible…
And the full thing with context is this:
Karen Twinem, with National Church Residences, which owns the Franklin House where Fitzgerald has lived since April 2011, said Fitzgerald told the staff she held back rent for the past three months because she thought she was going to die soon. Fitzgerald denied that claim, telling News 6 that she tried to pay October rent but was denied.
So your provided context is misleading and it shows that most people trusted you and didn't read the article for themselves.
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This is the part I twigged on: "Fitzgerald denied that claim, telling News 6 that she tried to pay October rent but was denied.." the entire thing is fishy. I was witness to an almost identical event involving a relative who was nearly as old and was a passive-aggressive manipulator right up until the end. Not saying that the woman in the article was manipulative, as none of us really knows, other than the nursing home and because of HIPAA rules they can not say the real situation.
Generally, nursing homes will keep residents for as long as they can. If she was saying afterwards that she did not need donations, it speaks to the fact that she might not have been poor. This could have been, like in my own relative's situation, that the nursing home staff was at their wit's end with the resident. That she's saying she had money and they STILL wanted her out.. That's a HUGE red flag that the resident is problematic.
My own relative was caught lying repeatedly to the point where the home had to double up staff when they interacted with her because she would claim her property was being stolen or things didn't show in the mail that she claimed had arrived..(Had to call the person who was sending the item and in fact, it was still on his kitchen table waiting to be mailed..)
The final line she crossed was that she had a Medtronic pump for her pain meds and she refused to give up the bolus that she'd dose herself with. They had their own scheduling for medications and of course with that, timing is everything so there was no control.. She was put into a police car against her will and sent to her home. Was so aggro with the cops they threatened to book her for disruptive behavior. Bounced right back into a different facility that had a bit more robust drug control policy and within a few short months got busted for smoking in her room.. with a roommate in the bed next to her that was on oxygen.
That was a fiasco of spectacular proportions. The temper tantrum she had after they turfed her room and took all the cigarette lighters and matches was thermonuclear and involved no less than half a dozen policemen trying to get her sorted.
When you deal with seniors that are really old, you CAN sometimes be dealing with someone that isn't going to play nice.
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You added absolutely nothing of relevance to the story.
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Notice the part where she said she stopped paying rent because she thought she was going to die, and later when she was offered money, said she didn’t need it and would likely give away the donations and just wanted her bible…
Damn you know what, in that case she totally deserved it.
Like who fucking cares? Why do you even think that's something important to mention?
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National Retirement Plan: Prison Industrial Complex
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of course its florida. eventually florida will be evicted by the ocean,
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The exact same thing would happen in California. Assisted living facility owners are crooks.
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"The Most Christian Nation™ "
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Jesus was clearly an anarchocapitalist. /s
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Why not gas her? It worked for the nazis.
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And waste good gas? Just throw her alive into the mass grave, and stack bodies on top like
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Worked for Churchill, nobody knew.
The nazis got some backlash and we'll never hear the end of it.
Unfortunately as an excuse to to much more horrible war crimes.
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David Graber suggests in Debt: The First 5000 Years, that the way you get someone to do something truely awful to another human is to hang a debt over their head so they feel that someone else is making them do it.
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'Murica
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are you "there yet", America?
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Mass graves?
Nah. Soon though.
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America has been doing mass graves frequently and for a long time.
Besides the genocide of indigenous people, there was the mishandling of COVID and the off-shored mass graves at the a Salvadorian mega-prison that Trump pays so many millions of dollars to use.
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Expect a lot more of this with the BBB bill cutting 800billion from medicade. Most seniors 62% in these homes are paid for by Medicaid after all of their assets have been liquidated. These places cost 10k a month or more.
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I know this is a socialist sublemmy, so “preaching to the choir”, but seriously let’s please abolish rent. I think folks are ready. Rent is basically what created capitalism, right?
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what about land value tax (in georgism)? is it a good alternative to rent?
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Nah i think it was banks that started capitalism
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Nope!
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In the
welthiestcountry with the biggest debt on earth -
This is why it's better to die and become a ghost and haunt a place.
Who needs to be 93? Especially in THIS timeline.
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If the legal system sides with landlords over our most vulnerable members of society, then it is not a legitimate vector of negotiation. What do you think people will have to do when the nonviolent option has been nullified?
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I know this may seem cruel but people who own property to rent it out are making a business of it. If you walk into a store and say I can't pay they aren't going to let you walk out with the merchandise its the same thing with rent. That being said having here arrested is a bridge to far in my opinion.
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Money is a stupid concept
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You USAians are half a step away of just shooting her.
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This story is very confusing, and I can only assume it's not as cut and dry as this screenshot of a tweet would have us believe. Being evicted because you can't pay your rent and being evicted because you decided to stop paying your rent are genuinely two different things
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You can play the centrist, but only if you throw away your morals. Even if she's refusing to pay rent, it's still simply appalling to throw her out. File a civil suit and collect the money in court or from her estate or something. After all, she's 93. If you throw her out, she will probably die. It really is that simple... Or maybe you have different values. I hope not, but some people really are that cruel.
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I honestly could not care less why she stopped paying
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"Ackchually, I don't know the details, so maybe they were right to evict an ancient woman"
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what would mao zedong do?
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all land should be publicized from the landowners. seriously!
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So, do we know whether she voted capitalist or socialist while she could?
202 comments
Responsible Americans blow their brains out at 75. How dare she.
I figure that if I get to my 80's or thereabouts, it will be time to end my life. I don't have the wealth, friendship, or health to enjoy my life at the age of deterioration. Hopefully, society will accept my choice, and offer a painless way to leave this coil.
That said, I would prefer this lady and all other people to have their twilight years to be enjoyable.
80s is too damn long. My retirement plan, same one, will be around 70 if I make it that long. Just judging by how shit it feels to be in my 40s, and I'm in pretty decent shape.