Living off $12k is not in any realm of "impossible" in a first world country. It may come as a surprise (halfly sorry for the snark), but most of the world (60%) lives under less than $1800/yr. The dreadfulness and despair of it goes away when it's a personal choice to live frugally.
There's a lot of things you can get for free or dirt cheap, when you choose to see the deals.
But they are not paying First World prices for anything. $12k/year between two people, owning no other assets than their $300k capital is not really do-able in the West. You could if you already owned 40 acres and were mainly self-sufficient.
I believe 13% of people+families survive under $12k/year in the U.S, i.e poverty. Stretching $7k with one person living in a city, is by no means impossible. Extremely uncomfortable by what you may have become accustomed to? Of course.
You can buy a day's meal at Walmart for $2. You can also couch surf indefinitely. And repair all of your current possessions, instead of replacing them. Such as clothes and electronics. There is a world of possibility.
There is a misguided individual here in the UK called Jamie Oliver who says things like that... It's true if you have the money upfront to buy in bulk. And somewhere to store it all, somewhere clean and dry, and a freezer. And a kitchen, and energy to boil water and run the oven. And know how to cook and have the time to do it (easy if you are "retired", not so much if you are working several minimum wage jobs). Etc, etc, etc.
I could spend very little on actual ingredients and have tasty, nutritious food every day, because everything else is taken care of. But I would never be so facile as to extrapolate that to someone without all the prerequisites that make it possible.
They're usually receiving significant government benefits in terms of healthcare, rental, and food subsidies. They're earning $12K/year, but certainly not living on that.
With £200k in liquid assets in the U.K. you would be unlikely to qualify for many benefits - especially if you had chosen to quit your job for no particular reason.
I'm not sure you've personally used "'pretty good'" treatment. There's a reason why generics and off-branded items are so cheap, and it's not because they don't do marketing. If you don't know: they're shit and the FDA will not prosecute large equivalency discrepancies.
I'm also not sure you've visited small town/rural doctors. While perhaps in the city (and under private coverage), doctors have natural competition with other professionals to provide the best service. Whereas doctors under relatively "public" coverage and in small areas without competition/alternatives, they really don't need to offer good, or even ethical service. It may not even be hugely unethical, like pulling wisdom teeth, when they're not causing issue or doing unneeded surgeries for "preventative" measure, or liberally prescribing medication under the guise of "quality of life improvement."
This post gives off a very strong sense of disassociation from the reality of things for the not-so well-off, i.e more than 90% of the population.
> There's a reason why generics and off-branded items are so cheap, and it's not because they don't do marketing. If you don't know: they're shit and the FDA will not prosecute large equivalency discrepancies.
I think the OP is overstating by calling generic drug "shit". However, generic drugs do not have to be identical to the branded versions. As measured by pharmacokinetics, they need to fall within 80% to 125% of the branded version. So there is some variation. This webpage does a nice job explaining.[1]
The generic drugs also do not have to have the same excipients (inactive materials used to make the final drug product like a pill or capsule). Normally this doesn't matter, but if you have an allergy to an excipient, the branded might be the only one you can take.
Finally, there have been issues with some generic drugs, namely generic Wellbutrin. The FDA asked for bioequivalence data on some dosage forms, but not the 300 mg pill. That pill released drug much faster than the branded and patients had some nasty side effects as a result. I've also heard the same with some generic anti-epileptics. Epilepsy is a disease where drug levels need to be very tightly controlled.
Sure, do you want evidence that generic manufacturers don't follow strict quality control and equivalency testing? I can dig those up from the FDA's database.
Do you want evidence that generics manufacturers fake their equivalency tests? This is going to be harder, because the FDA doesn't publish the private sector data. I can try to see what I have on hand.
Do you want evidence that the FDA doesn't prosecute these huge problems? I can only point to the routine handing out of the equivalent of "yellow cards," i.e warnings of misconduct, but still allowing repeat-offenders to sell in the U.S.
Considering the large degree to which your claims contradict the conventional wisdom of "generics are just as good as name brand drugs," it would be good if you actually gathered and presented some of this evidence (and demonstrated that these issues are prevalent/damaging enough to matter) instead of just threatening to do so.
I had a tough time trying to find some of these websites, like "Scale." Which doesn't own scale.com or scale.io or any other derivative, but "scaleapp.com."
I suppose, but a little more nuance is welcome. The CJR ran a piece about Seymour Hersh, but I think a lot of the things they had to say about Hanlon's Razor and similar aphorisms are thoughtful and relevant to this discussion: https://www.cjr.org/analysis/seymour_hersh_osama_bin_laden.p...
> No phrase has been bandied about more than “conspiracy theory” in describing Hersh’s reporting. Critics argue that he’s accusing “hundreds of people across three governments of staging a massive international hoax that has gone on for years.” How could that be possible?
> [...]
> [I]t is extraordinarily naive to think the government is incapable of keeping a large secret involving dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of people. I am reminded of this passage from the memoirs of Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, who knows a thing or two about how government secrecy works. Not only is the idea that you can’t keep secrets in Washington “flatly false,” Ellsberg writes, but by repeating it you’re doing the government’s work for them.
>> [Such sayings] are in fact cover stories, ways of flattering and misleading journalists and their readers, part of the process of keeping secrets well. Of course eventually many secrets do get out that wouldn’t in a fully totalitarian society. But the fact is that the overwhelming majority of secrets do not leak to the American public … The reality unknown to the public and to most members of Congress and the press is that secrets that would be of the greatest import to many of them can be kept from them reliably for decades by the executive branch, even though they are known to thousands of insiders.
> [...]
> The old adage that “three people can only keep a secret if two are dead” is a fantasy, and journalists should stop mindlessly repeating it.
Hey, this is neat! Unfortunately, after skimming the changelog, it still seems they're trotting along with Xen, and any "intermediate IT" person would still be using a bespoke solution.
Hey, sorry for the late reply. I got flagged for "posting too often," and just gave up after not being able to post this for a few hours:
Qubes is marketed as a VM for the "intermediate IT professional," i.e one that can setup a server from scratch and mess with configuration settings, even compile everything he needs from scratch, but not be able to make the informed decisions needed to harden things by himself.
So, this IT professional could install his own VM, set it up to sandbox his connections and programs, after reading documents and how-tos.
The benefits for bespoke:
1). Known toolset
This is pretty common in the "real world," where most would take a tool they're familiar with, than one they're not. In this case it would be the Linux environment. Why? Because the IT professional is already aware of the possible holes that he may need to fill and how to do it "correctly." I'm sure we all have had the experience of trying a new technology, messing up our first attempts at something decent, but then being able to make something good after practice. This is the same here. If you already know Qubes, great. If you don't and you're thinking about using it for your next project, make sure that project isn't mission critical.
2). Better documentation
Qubes OS is laughably under-documented (to parrot someone else's wording). With this comes the inability to be as flexible with the massivley-documented *BSD/Linux environment, limiting your overall productivity, and likewise, security and privacy. This also means you won't know where possible holes could develop, stemming from how the sandboxing really works in RT. This is a mostly solved problem with Unixes. You can harden your setup easily and with confidence, knowing you'll only be hit by massive zero days, if it all. With Qubes, you just don't know. Segue:
3). Qubes isn't battle-tested
The Xen debacle showed this. While Linux is not secure in any sense, we know where those insecurities lie through decades of use and misuse. This isn't the case for Qubes, which has been around less than Android.
4). Xen
Qubes uses stock Xen, which is not terribly good for security (direct access to hardware? What are you doing!?). You could better security by compiling your own version of Xen and removing all of the "niceties" that make Qubes not horrible to use. Or better yet, get a better hypervisor that's made for security in mind.
I think anyone that's looking for porn on Google is too lost to save. Polite society has moved on to better SERPs like Bing, Yandex, and thou that shalt not be shared.
And that more than 90% of all searches with "girl" are for porn. Google already killed most of its porn-lovin' demographic with the beheading of Google Videos in ~2009.
Also, I don't understand what you're trying to say here. I'm reading sentences, and I comprehend them, but there lacks an overarching idea to bring it all together.
Not really. If you know the patterns threat actors are using to deanonymize you, you can spoof yours to mimic the mean. You can even spoof them to create "writing profiles" for each of your identities. I know I already do.
There's a lot of things you can get for free or dirt cheap, when you choose to see the deals.