I'd never thought of it that way, but you're absolutely right, particularly in Germany, by a factor of at least 3-4. 50-55" mid-range TV: plenty under 400 EUR. Double-glazed window about that size, custom-made (because just about all windows in Germany are custom-made): 1200 EUR, and that was about six years ago - I shudder to think what it would be now.
Yep, loving my gesetzliche Krankenkasse (public health insurance, which is more like "highly regulated insurance"), even more than I liked the Privatkrankenversicherung (less highly regulated, but still with better guardrails than a lot of things I've seen in the States) I was on my first decade in the system here. Sure, there are some specialists who won't accept it, or who will give you a sooner appointment if you're private pay, but in that situation, you have the option of declaring that you're a self-payer that quarter, and your public insurance will reimburse in the amount they normally would have for that procedure or exam. For things like an MRI, the full retail cost in Germany is still much lower than in the US (it was about 600 EUR for my back a few years ago, while I was still privately insured, and I still had to wait for reimbursment).
Even once I do hit the income threshold to switch back to private (switching back to fulltime work), I'm pretty sure I won't.
As far as doctor choice goes, I feel like I have more on the public insurance here (like 90% of the population) than I did with UHC in the early 2000's back in the US. I certainly have fewer financial surprises.
It'd probably be such a small amount of money that it'd cost me more to cash the cheque. Lawyers are the only people who get rich over that kind of thing. Don't share any information with the robot that you don't feel comfortable with them using to make their service better. If you want to be fully in control of your interactions with AI then use llamafile which is 100% local. That's the healthy thing to do. Everything else is just rent-seeking and the fact that so many people are doing it is threatening much more important goals than money like transcendence.
If I never hear the theme to "Mickey Mouse Clubhouse" again, it will be too soon.
We don't let our kid watch TV at home, barely watching it ourselves, and have no streaming subscriptions. My American niece, on the other hand, a mere two years my son's senior, has had a TV in her room since at least age 5 with access to Disney+, and my brother and sister-in-law let her fall asleep to it. She was a good little hostess, putting on something she thought her younger cousin would like, and she was, sadly, correct. However, while she had spent her life with constant AV stimulation, my kid couldn't sleep.
I eventually had to tell her that if she wanted her cousin to sleep in her room, she had to turn off the TV at bedtime. This was very, very hard for her, and she couldn't understand why he couldn't sleep.
They still had Software Test Engineers (a different role from SDET) in 2001, when I was an STE intern in MacBU (Macintosh Business Unit), which at that point, was basically a compliance department in the wake of the US DoJ's massive anti-trust ruling against MSFT a few years before. Every month, the MacBU STE team lead would award "Scariest Tester" for whoever had found the best (scariest) bug.
We were also, essentially, Apple's Mac OS X post-release testing team (10.0 Cheetah was released while I was there, but I missed the party because my grandmother had died and I was back home for her funeral) - we ran into all sorts of exciting problems with basic OS functions.
One of the things MacBU prided themselves on was having fewer people putting out the whole Office suite PLUS Internet Explorer for Mac than there were working on Word for Windows alone, yet still managing.
But those social security taxes (theoretically) cover your future pension, and at least in Germany, health insurance also covers your sick days, which is why only true workaholics show up to infect the office.
My scheduled C-section (which my insurer likely didn't question me about because I was 40 and have other health issues) plus three-night hospital stay was about 5,000 EUR, all paid by my health insurance (private, so I know that 5,000 was the "retail" price), in a fairly prosperous part of Germany.
Not that the German health system isn't facing down some of the same demographic issues the rest of the well-off world is, but comparing wait times for specialists now that I'm on public (more like, very strictly regulated) insurance with my dad back in Texas on a combination of Medicare and supposedly good supplemental plan, I'm still in a better situation.
A strong public/heavily regulated independent insurers system gives the private insurers enough competition to keep prices in check.
Plus, I don't know of an insurer here, public or private, who also owns clinics or employs physicians, and they don't own pharmacies.
If I felt the need to optimise things like infra setup and config at an early stage of a project, I'd be worried that I'm investing effort into the wrong thing.
Having an LLM churn out infra setup for you seems decidedly worse than the `git push heroku:master` of old, where it was all handled for you. And, frankly, cheaper than however much money the LLM subscription costs in addition to the cloud.
Everyone back home in Texas wondered why my husband (a German) wouldn’t “let” us move to the US.
He was open to doing at least a few years over there; he’d enjoyed his exchange during university back in the 90s.
I was the one who said no, having seen the hell my colleagues married to Germans and other western Europeans were going through with US immigration.
Instead, I got a German residence permit without much fuss, and converted to a permanent one (Green Card equivalent) at a renewal when the clerk pointed out I was past the minimum time needed on my renewable one and encouraged me to apply.
Everyone complains about German bureaucracy, and I did have to bring in a fair bit of paperwork, but they do a prep appointment where they give you a list of exactly what they want to see from you specifically when you file your application.
For every anecdote here about a (very) bad experience with US immigration policy, there are 1000s daily that go on fine. It is a very large complex system that has issues, but for the majority it is working.
Find the specific issues and fix them.
Counter Anecdote: My wife won the Diversity Immigrant Visa Program, aka Green Card lottery. Came here with close to nothing and not speaking more than a sentence or two of English.
Makes sense - and I have interacted with bureaucracy in a lot of countries. The FUD that US immigration seem to install in immigrants seems uncalled for.
The Republicans have never liked immigrants. They have succeeded in keeping things underfunded so the bureaucracy stretches out far longer than needed in a sane system.
And underfunded to the point of delaying things despite fees for comparable activities being far more expensive on the US side than in Germany, and even before this year.
It's helping teach my five year old patience and not to flail around hitting the keyboard when something doesn't happen immediately. He only gets to watch videos and playlists I search out for him, and only when I'm in the room... no YouTube Kids here. Once he's able to spell well enough to search, I'll have to re-adjust.
I have found, and this might just be psychological, that if I hit pause, wait a second, then play, the video starts playing within a few seconds.
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