thatfrenchguy

> The result is a deeply distorted view of "normal." If ever struggling to focus or experiencing boredom is a sign you have ADHD > risk-aversion endemic in the striving children of the upper middle class

OP has likely never had a kid with ADHD (I get it, they're like 24), getting a kid to be ADHD diagnosed is neither fun nor something you would do lightly in the US.

Which is also why older millennials would just not get diagnosed and just struggle more. Tech is full high functioning people with ADHD and autism, it's not surprising you'd see so many students at Stanford being the same.

> If your digital ID is controlled centrally by the government (the guys that are watching most things you do already), and you need your digital ID to do most commercial interactions (banking, buying things, travel, etc), it means the government can revoke your ability to do any of those commercial interactions (or even other things that aren't strictly commercial, think "travel papers" for driving out of state).

The government can already do this today in the US, they can put your ID on a fly denylist, your passport on a "always go to secondary screening list" (ask anyone who's ever been to Iran on vacation and then decided to travel to the US) and your license plate on a wanted list.

I think OP here is just keeping a completely dominated plan (and his health insurance company knows it). He has less than 50 employees, he is not required to offer health insurance to his employees and he should go on the ACA market.

Given he has 3 children, 400% of FPL in 2026 is $150,600 so he's easily eligible for ACA subsidies (which, by the way, in 2021-2026, were available to everyone) by tweaking his income (easy to do when you have a company).

He also says uninformed things like:

> My wife and I are healthy, but we’re building our family and I have yet to see a marketplace plan that supports child-birth. Maybe the subsidized ones do, but I earn too much money to see those.

The premiums have nothing to do with the plans. Every single plan on the marketplace has to cover child-birth, that's sort of the point of the ACA.

> HMOs or EPOs that have some issues with them: coinsurance

What matters at the end of the day when you have a child is your maximum out of pocket (which you will 100% hit the year you have a child!). Whether you have copays or coinsurance after a deductible does not matter here. The ACA caps your maximum out of pocket at $18,400 no matter what (which, yes, is too high), so what you need to optimize for is premium + OOP for the providers that you care about.

Like, I get it, it's America, for healthcare like many other things (student loans, credit card debt, ...) it's easy to end up in a bad situation, but at some point you have to spend time understanding the game.

There is generally no point in doing this, keep a constant asset allocation that match your risk appetite, otherwise you're just playing the casino.

It's not free, but because of its unique market shaping power, the government is often the best & the cheapest way to do things like education or health care, because it has no incentives to spend money on bullshit to raise prices.

That's why there's a harpist in the hall in fancy hospitals in the US and not at Necker in Paris, or why the administration at universities in the US is multiple times the size you'll see in France. Market shaping incentives.

> There's a simple and effective escape hatch: study abroad. Europe, Australia, South America, Canada even. Some countries are more affordable than others but the most expensive (by far) option is staying in the US.

I mean, good luck finding a job in the US when your degree is not from the us (or maybe Canada). Most industries don't hire folks with overseas degrees.

> The 30+ minutes saved during his commute each day

I mean, you could also live closer to the office

Because of the FDA. Lots of meds already come from India, but if you buy them in France or the US, the price difference is 5x.

Those four countries have very different quota problems though: folks from Mexico and Philippines face a long wait in family immigration, mostly to bring their kids & siblings to the US ( https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/legal/visa-law0/v... ), whereas Indian nationals also face long waits for employment based green-cards.

Noting that you can always use your country of birth or your spouse's country of birth (cross-chargeability) for an employment-based green-card, my understanding has always been that Indians have large preference (or face large pressure) to marry other highly-educated folks that they often meet in the US but are also born in India that other immigrants just don't face as much.

Going for citizenship is pretty easy once you have a green-card, and you can do it without a lawyer. It's a bunch of easy paperwork and an interview.

Getting the green card though...

They are not "in line for citizenship", they're in line for a green-card, that's very different

easier to release the source code here and better for your customers right?

I mean, "cigarettes are the devil", especially for teenagers also have stuck.

I mean, in San Francisco, you’ll find plenty of good bread and pastries, it’s the only mid size city in the US that has enough French people to have two competing French language schools for kiddos.

> In the last decade or so American grocery stores have dramatically improved their cheese selections. I don't know if it is 100 different cheeses, but it is pretty darn close. And unusual regional cheeses come in all the time.

Eh, I mean, sure, if you go to a Whole Foods or Trader Joe, you’ll find cheese that might rival a discount chain in France at premium prices. If you go to Safeway, Target or Walmart, the cheese will not be anywhere near what a French (or I assume, a Swiss) person would find acceptable.

Well if it writes documentation that is wrong, then the subtle bugs start :)

Negotiated rates are per code here though, and doctors generally aren’t the ones doing the actual coding for the visit in the US, they have folks going through your doctor’s notes and figuring out the codes. Another reason why the overhead of health care is so high in the US.

Add a French and American person, in the US you hear "insurance did not approve", in France it's more "you can't get an appointment / the surgery provider does not have any spots unless you go to their spots in their private hospital".

The French system is more predictable (because any vaguely sane healthcare system has a price for a code instead of negotiated rates, negotiated rates is the most inefficient way to run this market) & you can get cost estimates though. And in both countries, if you live in a small town in both systems, the healthcare you will receive will suck.

In the US, you'll be billed the maximum out of pocket for your health insurance whether your little one is in the ICU for months or whether it was a easy delivery though, so at least birth is a predictable medical expense.

> But what you see in the end is that 90% of medias in France belongs to a few wealthy families that are friends with him.

The only way the current wave of right-wing media ends if by finding a new way to fund media & making it impossible to concentrate in the ends of a few rich folks.

And good luck with that, folks don't want to pay for media.

> charging infrastructure is still quite poor

Now that basically every car can access Tesla Superchargers and vice versa for Teslas, this is really not a problem anymore. We’re at the « sometimes I’m grumpy the best stop for my car does not have the exact amenities I want » stage now.

I guess is worse than the « the stop with the exact amnenities I want is not the provider with the cheapest electricity that I wanted » stage that we are in say, France.

If you look at EPA efficiency in 2020 and 2025, it hasn’t really moved that much for the same class of vehicle.

Yeah, no European is going to tell you this is "real cheese"

at Safeway or Walmart? Absolutely not what most europeans would consider "real cheese"

Yeah, I mean, any French person who goes to a Safeway or a Walmart will be shocked to see what the offerings are.

I mean, Whole Foods targets upper middle class folks, you’re far away from the average American experience

Really a market shaping failure by the federal government here.

> sat around a rock grunting at each other

Seems crazy to me, given anyone with children that is exposed to multiple languages can easily imagine how complex the language scene must have been in humans that did not write, given how easy and natural it is for little ones to pick up different languages that they speak with different people.

I can’t fathom this being an issue in 2025 where you can have digitized versions of your kid’s birth certificate on your phone, which indicate that you are their parent.

The kidnapping thing has nothing to do with names, if you only have one parent every country has their rules and you should check them out ahead of time.

I truly wonder how much time we have before some spectacular failure will happen because a LLM was asked to rewrite a file with a bunch of constants in it in critical software and silently messed up or inverted them in a way that looks reasonable and works in your QA environment and then leads to a spectacular failure in the field.