_DeadFred_

Actually medical debt is the norm for why people face bankruptcy in the USA.

65% of US bankruptcies are due to medical debt. https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/medical-b...

100,000,000 American owe $220 billion in medical debt. https://www.ilr.cornell.edu/scheinman-institute/blog/healthc...

In the US medical bills are half of all debts sent to collections.

41% of US adults have health care debt, 14 million had medical debts over $1,000 and 3 million had debts over $10,000. https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/brief/the-burden-of-medi...

65% of US bankruptcies are due to medical debt https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/medical-b...

530,000 American families file for bankruptcy due to medical bills every year https://balancingeverything.com/medical-bankruptcies-statist...

Debt burden is strongly associated with increased likelihood of suicide attempt https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33989465/

I lost my medical insurance due to the big beautiful bill. It's an interesting change in patriotism when your country says 'you know what, just fucking die because you are rebuilding your life. We don't believe in second chances in the USA'. For millions and millions this country is a ghoulish nightmare.

The above listed Washington, Idaho, Vermont, and Oregon are all industrialized societies.

Do Alfalfa growers traditionally use limited (and funded at large expense by the local community) municipal water hookups to grow their crops? Are alfalfa growers asking for new water hookup permits to access these resources?

Because DCs are, and that is the concern local communities have. Not random comparative statistics whose purpose seems to be to take valid local community concerns and pretend they're just a joke. How much do alfa growers in California add to my water bill? How much will new municipal water hookups by new data centers impact my water bill? One is a valid concern. One is just a BS attempt to discredit the valid concern. Because that is how this shady industry operates. On BS. On manipulation. And they wonder why they are more and more disliked.

The question is does DC building bring added costs to local communities. My small town has a backlog of home builders waiting for permits because of constrained municipal water capacity. We are still paying off the bonds for the last capacity we added. Golf courses/etc are already factored into current costs. Additional new use brings significant cost (bonds to build new capacity), funded by increasing expenses on the entire community, not funded by those who financially benefit from the new build outs.

The issue isn't comparative usage to existing hookups, it's new cost burden on the local community where a data center is built. Which is why DC propogandists switched to the golf course measurement, it confuses the original concern, the cost to the community of new DC hookups to municipal water or the very limited amount (of expensive to the community) available hookups that were intended/funded by the community for other purposes.

Did they commit that they were only going to use 1 million gallons? I got the impression they committed to not using the communities water?

1. So basically the majority of rural people, so you are saying rural Americans should fight against every AI datacenter built in their area if they want to keep access to drinking water. OK.

2. The existing homeowners were there first. Their community has a commitment to ensure that the largest expense they will ever have, their home, is fit for purpose and not impacted by those that come after. If I move next to an airport, can I just have the airport shutdown? No. But a datacenter can just make homes un-inhabitable because 'that's just how it goes'? BS.

Why sweep for them? The industry promises/makes commitments with the intention of not keeping them and going through back channels. F em. They are a scumbag/untrustworthy/'we only technically broke the law' industry at this point.

Oh, data centers are no louder than having planes flying overhead? And they are that 'quiet' a constant 24/7? Man, why would people complain about that?

"One California town found Flock's license plate cameras were wrong 71% of the time"

https://www.techspot.com/news/113320-one-california-town-fou...

and the saying OP is looking for is "You can beat the rap, but you can’t beat the ride". A police saying since the early 70s.

Our system is an direct descendant of the Norman conquest system over England, with a conquering class sitting at the top, feeling no connection to those lower than them, extracting any and all value they can from them.

Luckily we have doctors and trained professionals that propose the medical decisions and research that comes up with informed plans like immunization schedules.

Their parents disorders of being non-superhuman normal people who care so deeply about their children that it erodes their lives? What ghouls. Give me a break.

The things you list could have been done already. They aren't going to happen. They all require too much money for the modern world to choose them.

I remember the shared energy/crowds/community feeling of shopping during the holiday season.

I remember everyone singing along to songs.

I remember when products where safe. Amazon sell fuses that don't work. Food that is doctored. Fake versions of everything. AI generated books.

I remember when businesses were small enough we could and would boycott one that forced them employees to piss in bottles because 'efficiency'.

I remember a ton of times Google maps just fed me straight bullshit.

I remember when CVs weren't automatically rejected based on bullshit criteria/AI decisions without ever being looked at by a human being.

I remember a thousand percent different/more authentic nerding out/hacking community than todays 'embraced' nerd/geek culture.

All of these tools have a horrible side, and because of scale there's not much we can do about it (how do you verify what Google tells you isn't going to get you killed? https://www.sfgate.com/national-parks/article/google-map-res...

and the horrible side keeps growing, while the improvement seems to have mostly happened over a decade ago at this point, with techno optimism beaten out of most of us since then by the very companies that improved our lives a decade ago.

Anecdotally, I watched parents of autistic children become ghosts/shells of who they were. It seemed like much higher divorce rates, and towards the kids reaching highschool just single, burnt out mothers barely holding things together with no social life and their world reduced to just their kid(s).

The cure shouldn't just be up to the kids, but to the invisible caregivers who give up way more than average parents.

They do not think this. They pretend to still believe this in order to continue their 'starve the beast' strategy, but their actual goal is to damage the government/run up debt, not the pretend 'trickle down economics' they claim.

The Republicans have ran on 'starve the beast' and intentional breaking of our government/programs/etc in order to meet their philosophical aims for 40 years. Republicans actively try to damage our country and do bad fiscal policy because they put their agenda over the the health of the nation.

It's not surprising they don't care because they literally have policy to do damage like this and their explicit goal has been this exact outcome.

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'we couldn't follow the law because the law's hard, instead we started the gateway for Trump by bending the rules, destroying norms, pretending the meaningless has meaning and creating pretext Conservatives could use for ignoring (first) these fake rules, but later under Trump huge amounts of the the real rules.'.

It was a bullshit agreement, and everyone knew it was, and were knowing in that what they were doing would weaken/damage politics in the USA and adherence to the rules. And they did it anyways. To no productive end but lots and lots and lots of damage.

Bullshit. Crazy to see we have so many wanna be murderers among us on hacker news though.

You responded to

     'It's astonishing how many people really seem to think that total collapse / destruction of a system can be an effective way for fixing things' 

with

     'Czar Nicholas was "prosecuted" quite rapidly after the russian revolution.' 

as the only tangible you gave. Then this spiel on the people and desire for violence.

The current system works better than any previous system for redress. In fac the regime is having to bypass the system/break the system in order to get away with what they are getting away with. Destroying the system will not put them in their place. Breaking the system in fact gives them more of what they want. More power. More ability to abuse the current environment.

Taking us back to the previous system, and putting in the hard and mundane work of keeping it working is the much better solution if people want redress, not continuous 'we just need to break it a little more because feelz/it's simpler/our political class (that we could, you know, work to get voted out) suck (and all we do is whine about it)'.

Yes, murder is easy after collapse. But murder is not a fix.

There is no such thing as a binding 'agreement' like this in the USA system of government. We have treaties. That have to be ratified by the Senate. The governments of the world understood this, and understood that the Paris climate agreement was an attempt by the US executive branch at the time to bluff to a hollow 'deal' (instead of creating a true binding treaty) hoping future politicians would be too embarrassed to go against it. It was incredibly disingenuous/misleading of the United States Executive branch at the time to do play politics this way outside of the actual US system of treaties. It was part of the breaking of American laws/norms by the executive that led us to where we are today (with chaos, tribalism instead of a legal system, and a breakdown of our government).

Wrongly flagged dead (like a lot of comments get on these Iran threads):

know-how 1 hour ago [dead] | parent | next [–]

Iran has been killing Americans and Israeli since the 1970s. Read a history book.

And a ridiculously high percentage of the time markdown prices on the shelves at Walmart are not reflected at checkout. Happened to me just this weekend. Walmart, one of the largest companies in the USA, whose job is to sell items, can't do the basics of keeping pricing/signage in sync? BS.

Or we could build on and enforce the 300+ years of thought and trial that went into copyright law so that individuals are re-empowered.

But nah, let's do the most radical, least thought out thing, and absolutely destroy small scale creators. I'm sure Amazon will be benevolent and continue to pay writers in your scenario.

What is with 2026 and just conceding civilization to the worst actors, and then adopting the worst tactics/thoughts/concepts?

Many communities are water limited. Many communities limit housing construction permits to available sewer hookups. Many communities are carrying expensive bonds that citizens are paying off to fund water expansion projects.

I do not want one penny of infrastructure that I have paid for in order to grow/better my community going to subsidize infrastructure for datacenters.