Get your own domain and use it for mail routing to whichever email service of your choice. Afaik gmail offers this, and so does probably any other decent email provider. That way if a provider turns to shit, you just need to set up with a different one, but don’t have to change any accounts.

Downside: you will have to pay for that domain for the rest of your life (or change all accounts again)

I’ve been meaning to do this for a while, maybe I’ll finally do it now.

Not sure how much the people you talk to about this care about facts supporting the argument but if they do, the US government spends by far the highest %gdp on healthcare out of any country in the world (https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/public-health-expenditure-share-gdp?tab=table), and people still go bankrupt from medical debt.

Now, in reality this figure is likely a bit skewed because well earning jobs (like doctors) in the US make obscene amounts of money (hello extremely high income inequality), but you don’t have to tell them that, and also the other argument still applies anyway.

To add something else, preventative care can often save costs compared to the ailments it’s trying to prevent. By making preventative care free, more people are likely to get it, reducing overall healthcare costs.

Oh hey I feel kinda similarly, except I don’t have a car and don’t plan on having one bc that’s an insane amount of spending for something I thankfully don’t need at all.

From that perspective: I think ideally most private car use would be rental cars. We aren’t going to connect every rural place via public transport overnight, and if you need to transport more than people cars make perfect sense for the job anyway.

People in rural areas might still realistically need cars for a long time to come, and I also dislike completely preventing people in cities from owning cars, partially because I totally get that driving cars can be fun and other hobbies have their own carbon footprint. But, as expensive as being a car enthusiast already is, it probably has to get more expensive as cars become purely a luxury. The costs to the individual should reflect the burden they put on society as a whole.

Other than better city planning to simply reduce people even wanting to use cars, I think other good measures (than just increasing taxes) to achieve this could be parking space requirements like japan has. Beyond that I think we really just need a cultural shift away from “everyone has a car obviously” which I’m starting to verrryyy slowly see at least.

Ideally in the long term utopian future I’d want highways to mostly be abandoned, with long distance freight being done by rail and only local distribution by road vehicles. The main use of highways would then be those choosing cars as their hobby and private transport of goods, e.g. for moving. Within cities road vehicle use would only be for transporting goods (and ofc emergency services). But even if we put everything we have towards that I don’t think I’d live long enough to see it lol

Yes. But the elderly get that money from past labor. Which does not contribute in the present. The entire system of retirement is built on the assumption that you work for more than 1 person until retirement to provide for the elderly (and well, also to provide for children) so that then, once you are retired yourself, the next generation will provide for you.

There being fewer children does feather the effects a little though.

Self sufficient? So youre saying they grow their own food and repair all their own homes?

It’s a simple problem of not enough laborers to provide all the menial everyday ressources people want/need, while a growing number of people is retired and still consumes these things. We’re technologically advanced enough that it won’t cause us to starve, but fewer people making things when the same amount of people consumes things will always lead to lower quality of life if technology doesn’t offset it by automating labor.

Capitalism is merely the cruelest system at this, since it will always fuck over the vulnerable first. Under capitalism it’s a problem for old people and everyone whose elderly parents are still alive, under a fairer system it would equally affect everyone, but to a lesser degree.