Album on lemmy.ca, beehaw.org, shit.itjust.works & lemmy.world

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Cake day: June 7th, 2023

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  • Thankfully in my youth I was given the space to be my true self, so now that I have a job/wife/kids with a ton of responsibility and have to “pause” some of my self, I don’t mind it was I was really quite self centered and self absorbed for the first 30 years of my life. I balanced school with going out or doing my hobbies.

    My true self now is a passion for my family and my job, and I know that long term my kid will become distant and I wont always work so for the moment I am happy to be “paused” and still carve out some time for myself 3-4 hours a week to enjoy my hobbies by myself. But the real trick is integration, my son knows that the real me is someone who wants to do a lot of activities with him all the time, and so I take the time to participate in his hobbies, and naturally he is very interested in learning mine or watching me do mine.



  • Immigration is permanent residence. You can move somewhere not permanently, like on a temporary work visa - that is an expat. US/UK/Canada have a lot of treaty agreements with other countries, so a Canadian citizenship will essentially allow you into many countries more easily than those coming from a third world country. People from third world countries have to go through a more intensive visa process for temporary residence.

    Another reason expat applies generally is because generally an expat from the US does not renounce their US citizenship despite the tax implications due to the need/desire to return home. The US is one of the few countries that will tax a US citizen anywhere in the world, which I think leads to the increased use of the word expat.







  • As a Canadian it’s insane to me to have a bill at all after going through some sort of health ordeal the last thing you need is a big scary bill with something to do.

    if I honestly can’t pay my share. I can walk into the billing office at the clinic /hospital and explain I honestly can’t afford my share. The hospital will bill the insurance what they can, then look for extra funding. Most hospitals have a charity fund. It is based on my income. If I am broke and make crap wages, my share might be reduced to 0 usd.

    So the ask here is for someone who already need to work every waking moment, and then just lost a bunch of hours being hurt/sick, to then spend their time explaining multiple times to the billing dept that they cant afford it (this is degrading) and then their bill MIGHT be reduced but it also MIGHT go to collections and which further goes to damage the individual by hurting their credit. just seems like a burden on the poor.

    But yeah i mean its a difference in systems. I think about how canada builds it into taxes - everyone pays in at a rate consistent with their income levels and benefits similarly - but the US way is donations. And I hope that works too. It seems to work from what i’ve seen so far. but it seems like a round about way to get it done.


    1. The intense income disparity.

    2. Healthcare bills.

    I suppose these are cliche topics but as a non-american non-tourist the first thing that has stood out to me is that the highs are so incredibly high, and the lows are so incredibly low. Being a Canadian, it’s not like we don’t also have income disparity…but the gap is not as insane. The rich in the US have yachts that are 100’s of millions of dollars, and the poor literally carry their kids on their backs while selling fruit on the side of the highway. You can see both in the same day.

    Also I don’t think Americans truly understand that you can get weeks of hospital care in Canada and not even receive a bill. Like a month in a private hospital room and i paid for a phone bill, a wifi bill, and some parking fees. In the US if you even so much as flash your eyelashes at a doctor you get a bill for hundreds of dollars.





  • I think it’s more an existentialist response than an indictment of Binghamton:

    “Everybody has to have a hometown, Binghamton’s mine. In the strangely brittle, terribly sensitive make-up of a human being, there is a need for a place to hang a hat or a kind of geographical womb to crawl back into, or maybe just a place that’s familiar because that’s where you grew up. When I dig back through memory cells, I get one particularly distinctive feeling—and that’s one of warmth, comfort and well-being. For whatever else I may have had, or lost, or will find—I’ve still got a hometown. This, nobody’s gonna take away from me.” —Rod Serling