Comment by SXX

because code is only a small part of software development. don't forget ping pong tables. lol. I'm both making a valid point and making fun of it too.

You can make all sort of excuses but we literally felt bad for 1:1 exchange students paying 2k a month while we paid 2k a year.

Their education was not 10x ours and their economy was only a few % over ours per capita.

I dunno, telehealth with foreign doctors while maybe in-person nurses could lower costs substantially.

If it was this simple, then high costs would be limited to the labor-driven portion of the bills.

This is not the case.

But that is not because it's less efficient. With the Canadian system being socialzed and 20k$ being just 8% of your income it is to be expected that you would pay moch more than the median person into the system.

"I make $250k CAD a year, my experiences must be representative of, and relevant to, the masses," is a wild thought to have.

Well, maybe I spoke too soon, because my private American healthcare turns out to also be about 8% of my gross income (of $60k)(before copays and my deductible)(and also it's crap). Twinsies!

But yes I agree that it would be awful to have my health needs taken care of and a mere ~160k USD left to spend on everything else.

> Canadians like myself have ~40% of our provincial taxes spent on healthcare

Worth noting that taxes in the US are a lot lower than they should be because a large portion of government expenses are financed with debt. Canada owns over 400B in US debt, so that's Canada "subsidizing" US taxes.

Also, yes, that's how healthcare works: when you're young and less sick, you tend to pay more than you get out of it, and then it reverses as you get older.

What do you mean "quite a bit less of my gross income went to healthcare"? Are you factoring in the insurance premiums paid by your employer? For many people that is both an invisible and significant health care cost.

there is a big chunk of people who wouldn't afford healthcare in the USA but still have access to in Canada. I don't mind paying more taxes if this means everyone has healthcare access.

That’s pretty comparable actually. The most recent quote I received for private healthcare in the US was just under $2,000 per month ($24,000 per year).

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it is for what you get. the US LEC and CLEC system sucks, and I had wayyyy more options in the EU, and in fairly upfront and straightforward ways.

e.g. https://documentscontractuels.orange.fr/les-offres-orange-mo...

// subsidize demand and restrict supply

I have never seen anyone articulate this so crisply.

The government has created a situation with the student loans thing where basically anyone can borrow 500k to get an obviously useless degree.

Are the colleges going to ensure they collect that money? Obviously yes.

Why was that not a problem in the mid 1800s when we crisscrossed the entire country with railroads and telegraph cables?

Sure is funny how FDR had us spend a little cash 100 years ago to ensure even the remotest farm gets electricity, and we already gave ISPs a shitload of cash to do the same, but now "We can't" build telephone poles to rural places. Even though those same places already have telephone poles for power and telephone.

AT&T was able to leverage it's monopoly position and defense industry relationship to basically invent everything that runs the modern world (and were compelled to license those advancements out) while modern monopolies can't even dig some holes.

Sounds like we need some more "Consent Decrees" and a DoJ that makes large companies scared.

We damned every single river in the nation. We built so much railroad that it crashed the industry. We built those railroads purposely in places where nobody lived and then willed towns into existence around them. We built the interstate highway system.

Why can we suddenly not build anything? Maybe it's because people keep insisting, against all historical evidence, that we can't, and they don't even try.

That really explains only small parts. Even the horrible suburbs have little real reason to be that expensive. In the end it is really about lacking actual free market and enabling corporate capture as voted by the voters.

That’s not the reason. The required build out has actually already been been paid for: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-book-of-broken-promis_b_5.... But the US is so politically broken that corporations could just pocket the money without actually providing the infrastructure.

That does even begin to touch on crazy laws banning people from setting up their own ISP to compete: https://www.techdirt.com/2024/11/07/16-u-s-states-still-ban-....

> the US is geographically huge and more sprawled out.

There is ample historical evidence that this is a poor excuse.

Long ago, leaders in the US understood the value of universality. You'll likely recognize this as the Network Effect, Metcalfe's Law, etc. Back in the day, they called this "universal service." That thinking was central to the policies established for both electrification and phone service in the US: it wasn't then, and isn't now, truly universal, but what could be feasibly accommodated was, even when costs were/are quite high.

It wasn't lost on the people of those times that such policies inherently meant the cost of including sparsely populated, distant areas would be subsidized by concentrated areas. Before those systems appeared, the founders welded the same thinking into the US constitution in the form of the US postal service, with exactly the same knowledge and concerns.

We've lost that. The change happened prior to the advent of the internet. You're free to attribute this to whatever you wish; I won't offer my view on that, except to say there are no innocents: every argument that fingers ebil capitalists can be countered by examples of urban leaders damning government policies that subsidize non-urbanites. What I know with certainty is, if packet switched networking was somehow a thing in the 19th century, availability would be a given for almost any structure more significant than a hunting cabin in the US today, complete with common carrier, service baselines and rates established with clarity.

That might explain internet pricing in North Dakota, but it doesn't explain it in NYC or DC or LA.

I stuck to a debit card for decades but got tired of the discrimination after it was rejected by the IRS as validation for COVID stimulus. Gas stations could be problematic. Canada could be problematic. Everything works with a credit card. If you are a responsible spender you may as well reap the benefit of the wealth transfer.

In my country card fees are less than cash fees, so I guess that's a wealth transfer from card payers to cash payers?

And often the credit card companies try to enforce this by writing wording into their contracts that try to stop merchants offering different prices for different payment methods.

Card network rules in the US prohibit merchants from adding a surcharge for payment with a debit card. Most merchants are either unaware, or prefer not to care. If you are using a debit card at a business that assesses a card surcharge, point out that your card is a debit card when paying and refuse to pay the surcharge. If that does not help, there are online forms available from both Mastercard and Visa where you can submit a merchant complaint.

And it wasn’t out of the goodness of their hearts that they changed - they finally lost enough big court cases over it, it was to avoid heavy handed legislation.

I think it's true for most businesses with single transaction being big enough - car dealerships, child care, rent. On the other hand many of them are not happy with cash either because processing cash also incur fees that are not nesessarily less than credit card fees. Most businesses that prefer to take cash are smaller ones because most likely they won't report it.

Never heard about this before but it sounds crazy. Are you able to control this somehow, like reject business cards?

Even if the FX is notionally "free" they pick the rates. So they can set those rates to generate exactly the same profit for them as with fees.

You will probably not see rates that are even competitive with a dodgy FX cash place at an airport, let alone with the numbers you've seen on financial networks for what FX transactions by banks cost, but you feel happy because there was "no fee".

This is misleading. Banks put a fee on foreign transactions, many do this even if the transaction is in the card's native currency.

The card companies always add a margin to FX conversions, usually in the 0.5% range. This is fairly benign since the market rate can move between the transaction and the settlement, so sometimes you save money.

I think this is generally mitigated: When traveling, people use the card that doesn't have this fee. You have cards A and B. Has a fee; B doesn't. At home you use either. When traveling, you use B.

Amex has very spotty acceptance rate in Europe.

US are not generous either. Merchant increase prices by 5% to cover costs, you get 2.5% cashback and visa/your bank pockets the other 2.5% you're paying.

I'd say it heavily depend on country. In some of them they are popular, but in others even debit cards is something only few people have.

And as a result of that, Amex is often not accepted.

I only get cashback on my Amex, nothing with Visa or Mastercard; perhaps I could shop around but over 90% goes on my Amex so haven't bothered to.

At least in the UK Amex interchange fees are not capped like Visa and Mastercard.