Shorter Yards

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So, what you're saying is you really, really appreciate the BBC.

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There is a degree of honesty here, buried within all the crap, but it is something that people choose themselves.

Living in the USA can be expensive, but is cheaper in a multitude of smaller, less populated areas.

People choose to spend an excess on TV, subscription services, etc. They aren’t necessities. They could turn them off.

People choose to be poor managers of their household expenses.

It is all based on choice.

Scruffy has lived overly comfortably in less expensive areas on the country with an income of $30k, and he was still able to save a significant amount of money and take international vacations.

Everything is a choice. Americans just feel they have to show off to others.

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Yeah, I also think it's about "keeping up with the Jones's". It's a shame people don't realize that others really don't care.

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Yet, a couple hundred million people manage to afford it every day.

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Yes they do.

LINK

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I’ve recently moved to the States — shudder — for a year or two. And I’m shocked at how expensive just life is. For no good reason at all.

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When I put my economist hat on, a fact becomes clear to me. American life is a gigantic rip-off, one of the world’s biggest, and that’s why America is now effectively a country of poor people, and that makes it a nation of angry, cruel, and selfish ones, too.

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But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me start over. American life is the biggest ripoff in the world. Or at least one of the biggest, in the top five, certainly. Just…existing. It costs way, way more than it should. So much so that America cannot ever move forward as a society. So, trapped in a cycle, which economists call a “poverty trap,” Americans now stay poor.

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How much do I pay for internet and TV in Europe? About thirty dollars, give or take. How much do I pay in America? $150. That’s five times as much. And what I get in America is way, way worse. At least half of the junk on TV is ads, I don’t get the wonderful and illuminating and sparkling stuff that European TV makes on a regular basis, from good coverage of global affairs to politics to economics to ground-breaking shows and movies. I’m getting massively, massively ripped off. Why? Let me answer, with another example.

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Let’s take utility bills. They’re astronomical in America compared to the rest of the rich world, and even much of the rest of the world period. Heating, electricity, gas, water? These things can easily add up to $500 to $1000 dollars per month. That’s not even factoring in property taxes and maintenance costs and whatnot. Americans have no idea, but in Europe I’d pay maybe — maybe — half that, if even that much.

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How much does it cost to just…have a place to live? The average American rental is about $1200. That’s for an apartment. Again, that’s a particularly high figure. It doesn’t cost that much to rent in Europe. In France, the the average house rental costs less than that — it’s about 800 euros, or maybe $1000 dollars.

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The sad truth is that nobody can afford to live that way, at least not in a modern society. We know that because the average American doesn’t. They go into debt. Deeply into debt. So deep that the average American now dies underwater to the tune of about $60,000. They’ve spent a lifetime paying off debts that they can never fully make good on — precisely because the system is rigged against them.

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No matter if you're short or tall, not a damn thing you can do about it. Now being fat or skinny, that's a whole different discussion.

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Chicken pepperoni?

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Aurora's Chicken Pepperoni, right after she gets her feet scraped.

Yeah, she's hideous :lol: :pimp:

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good cops

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ox·y·mo·ron /?äks?'môr?än/
Learn to pronounce noun a figure of speech in which apparently contradictory terms appear in conjunction (e.g. faith unfaithful kept him falsely true ).

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Now replace that with black people, muslims, etc.

Sounds pretty damn stupid now, doesn't it?

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He eventually snapped and used her powers to put every other oil and gas business in Texas under his control or in bankruptcy.

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Didn't help him from getting shot though.