[mmh0000]

Wow. It’s scary to think this person votes.

A dude makes a series of terrible decisions. Decides to not learn from any them. Then blames society. Okay.

But my early story is eerily similar to his. Expect instead of just my dad dropping out to do drug, so did my mom. I grew up constantly moving between women’s shelters, random peoples couches and storage units.

And while he was in rural Oregon, I was in rural Idaho.

I ditched my parents as soon as I could. I worked basic non-silicon valley tech jobs. Moved from help desk ticket closer to actual IT career. No college, no money or time for it. Did alright.

Yeah life would have been a fuckton easier if I had supportive parents. But I’m in a good place and what I did wasn’t magic or luck. It was simply get basic job. Get shit apartment. Get slightly better job. Repeat.

This dude is deep in incel territory, which you can tell from the incel words he drops throughout his rant.

This dude says he never expected or needed any hand outs but several paragraphs earlier was complaining that the food bank didn’t provide vegan food. Ooohhh Kay. I have a lot of thoughts about both those statements. But dang dude. Maybe if you’re starving you should take any food you can get and deal with the rich people virtue signaling once you can afford to eat.

(To clarify on the above, being vegan is fucking great. It’s good to not kill animals… but you gotta take care of yourself before you take care of a cow.)

Yeah parts of the system are screw up. Yeah some people get a really unfair hand. But this guy was in generally good health, should have had health insurance through these crap jobs he was complaining about for his skateboard thing. (Which is another wtf that shows total lack of risk analysis. Who choses skateboarding as a hobby when you can’t afford a doctor. Jeez. Take up running.)

[uqual]

You, especially as someone who has "been there", nailed it.

And congrats on taking personal responsibility rather than blaming others and society for your bad decisions (and I'm betting that you, like most of us, have made some bad decisions from time to time - but try to learn from them rather than wallow in them).

[queenkjuul]

You were absolutely lucky. And nobody had health insurance at a $10/hr job in 2004

[mmh0000]

My first job was Call Center tech support for eMachines (through a random 3rd-party contractor called "Alorica") at a whopping $7.25/hr in 2003.

It had health insurance. Not great insurance, mind you, but insurance. It would cover ER-type emergencies and had something like a $100 co-pay for standard visits. It was basically "don't go to the doctor unless you're actually dying insurance," and if you're in generally good health, like I was, or the author of this article. It's "good enough".

My next job after that was sales-drone at CompUSA for a whole 7.65/hr. But they had slightly better insurance. Then they went out of business. And my job after that was as a phone agent at Delta Airlines, starting at $8.50/hr and rising to $11.77/hr when I left.

It wasn't until 2007 that I got my first real tech-job. And it was still customer service. But it paid $15/hr and had "normal" insurance.

I fully realize the insurance situation is f'ed. And those in less good health get quite screwed. But, this guy... This guy caused himself a lot of his own problems.