Gaslighting

[msconduct]

 I've read a lot of complaints from people in the US recently about the price of gas, which seems to be about $3/gallon. I've always been vague about the conversion to litres, not just from gallons but from AMERICAN gallons, which I have no clue about at all. But I just looked it up and did the conversion. A US gallon of gas at $3.60 is around 95 cents a litre.

I'm crying. Gas, or petrol as we call it in New Zealand, is around $3 a litre, or more than three times the cost in the US. Other than a very brief dip in 2016, petrol hasn't been under $1/litre since 2000.

Comments

[msconduct]

Everything else seems to be wonderful!!!

I'm afraid it definitely isn't! We have had record-breaking migration this year as people have fled to countries with higher paying jobs and cheaper housing. As well as our insanely priced housing which stops people from getting on the property ladder, everything is much more expensive here, both because of our distance and isolation and because several years ago they suppressed the NZ dollar to help our exporters. This means everything coming in costs vastly more than it does in the US. For example one of my Dreamwidth friends just priced a Speed Queen washing machine and it was $2,000 - mine was $3,200. Couple that with higher paying jobs and mostly lower cost of living in Australia (Kiwis are entitled to live there and vice versa) and so many people have been leaving for a better economic future. I don't blame them - I'm OK as I bought my house when it was cheap, but it's very very tough otherwise.

As for monorail: Auckland is in deep debt and we've just had a lot of our train projects cancelled. They were supposed to be putting in light rail but the cost ballooned to so many billions that it had to go, after wasting tons of our rates.

[echomyst]

Guess no country is perfect, eh?

Consumer goods are loads more expensive in Canada too compared to the U.S., but I'll take highly subsidized healthcare any day over this insane American healthcare system that can actually bankrupt you.

Sweden seems like an idyllic country with a strong social safety net, so I was surprised when my Swedish friend said she prefers raising her family in the U.S. -- "there's more diversity here and everyone has to be the same in Sweden"... so, wonderful if you fit in to the mold, but not if you don't? I would not have fared well under their covid response, for example.

[msconduct]

Yes, the healthcare is that one terrible gotcha that trumps everything else. A close friend had cancer and died in 2019, and in the middle of the awfulness of all that, I remember thinking how much worse it would have been if she had been worried about paying for treatment on top. Even the copays seem high.

I have no idea what Sweden were thinking with Covid. It doesn't seem at all in line with their collectivist ethic. All during that time people bombarded us online with "You're being enslaved by your government (nope!) and you should be more like Sweden!". Yeah, well, Sweden has had 27,000 Covid deaths and we with half the population have had less than 6,000 (and while we were taking full Covid measures it was 53). No thanks. Some European countries can be a bit conformity-requiring. My friend T was born in the Netherlands and says a common expression there is "It's not normal!" (that being a bad thing). What wrong with not being normal?:).