That’s why I am arguing against the OPs statement that they would be suspicious of anyone who goes there because “nothing good happens there”

But like if you had a work friend tell you that they are going to Thailand for vacation would your first thought be sex tourism or just normal vacation?

Maybe I just don’t associate with people who are pieces of shit because none of my friends who went to Thailand or the Philippines went there for sex tourism… obviously it exists there but to discredit the entire country as just a place of sex tourism is extremely xenophobic, if the majority of people you know who go to Thailand are going for sex tourism that sounds like more of a problem with your friend group

I just can’t imagine having a person I call a friend who told me they came back from Thailand and my thought went to I bet they went there to sleep with underage prostitutes. Like I know people do that but I would never willingly associate with a person who I thought would do that

Thailand is an absolutely beautiful country with amazing food why would you say “nothing good happens there”, I don’t know enough about the Philippines to have an opinion about it but that also seems like quite an overstatement for them as well

AR is coming around a bit but the innovations I have been following with it are less individual consumer based. The absolutely crazy one my company was trying to implement was for an area that deals with fairly dangerous chemicals and had a lot of complex piping so with the glasses they would be synced to the equipment so you could track pipes, see through walls, and see plant conditions while just wearing some AR glasses.

I know they have also talked about trying to do something similar in surgical fields as well

I personally think the cost to make a good AR interface is just way to expensive to justify the consumer market right now, like for our AR system if it stopped a single incorrect discharge it would mostly pay for itself as that could be millions of dollars/ loss of life but for an average person who might use it to see overlays of fun fact esque things while they walk around a $1000/mo cost just doesn’t make sense

Generally speaking yes, some caveats where people still end up with more debt than they can handle is if you have a family insurance plan your max out of pocket usually doubles, so you can be looking at 2x the amounts I quoted.

The other big one for a lot of health insurance in the United States the employer pays a percentage and the employee pays a percentage for it so generally speaking shittier jobs pay a lower percentage and have worse plans so a person making 30k/yr might have to pay $300/mo for kind of shitty health insurance and if they have the mindset of “I never get sick” that’s an easy expense to cut so they can end up with the uncovered medical expenses

Then there is also if a person leaves a job and before they get a new job they are without insurance and you can pay the entire premiums yourself but those can easily be hundreds of dollars that if you don’t have an income can be rough

Also companies don’t need to contribute to insurance unless you are full time so it’s a common practice that companies like Walmart will intentionally keep people part time so they don’t have to pay benefits and a person ends up working two jobs so they still make too much for Medicaid, don’t get insurance through either job, and are usually still trying to pinch Pennies to save money so shelling out the several hundred dollars a month doesn’t seem worth it

Personally what I find to be the ironic scam of all of this is people in the U.S. generally pay for insurance directly out of their paycheck and so when they talk about their paycheck being so much smaller than their gross salary they always blame “taxes” when in reality a sizable percentage of their salary is going to health insurances, but they don’t want nationalized healthcare because it would raise their taxes more than it is. When in reality US citizens pay more money between health insurance, Medicaid, Medicare, copays, etc then the cost of health care in countries with “free” healthcare by 50-100% and have lifespans that are significantly shorter

So there is also an out of pocket maximum which is the most you’ll pay in a calendar year no matter how much your expenses are which vary by insurance plans but in my experience have generally been between 5-15k with 15k being for much cheaper insurance and 5k being for better insurance so if you have 1m in medical expenses and copay would be 200k it would instead be just that max out of pocket of approximately 10k, which while not great is much more manageable. The unfortunate thing is that is tied to the year so if you start treatment in November and finish treatment in March that 10k per calendar year turns into 20k since it was over the course of 2 years