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The propaganda works though. People outside of the US struggle to see, and believe that the US has its own damning problems. 2 years ago I got close to a Romanian bartender while traveling. She told me about how she held scorn for her sister, who moved to the US despite having been warned against it.
What happened to her sister is what so many of us are victims of. Debt trapping, stalled wages, poor access to medical care and financial incentive to not seek care. Not to mention the poor quality food that wears you down.
As a result, she has had to send money to both her sister and Mom, and had to cancel several contract terms and vacation seasons off to care for her Mother. Her sister couldn’t help due to being in debt, and at risk of losing her job if she were to travel, regardless of the emergency.
It’s a cruel system that bundles up as an image of living free. The marginally higher standard of living has a lot of cracks, but they’re hard to see until you’re living with them.
And yet we don’t want our posts to be fed into AI slop, nor do we want independent hosts to pay for the massive amount of traffic generated by a massive corporate entity to trying to consume data en masse.