Second, I actually had to google to find out if GoFundMe actually existed in the floating timeline, and yes it did. (It was about two years old as of tonight’s posting.)
It is. There’s actually a lot of sad stories about people who turned to GoFundMe or other crowdfunding sites in a last ditch attempt to try and scrape together the money they needed. There’s one particular story I remember about a guy who tried to get the money for just 1 month’s supply of insulin. He failed to get enough… And he died later that month from diabetic-related complications. And that’s just one of the many, many failures who never make it “viral” enough to cover their expenses.
What even worse is that the popular goFundme are of for tragic tales of people turning away from medicine to try for hyper-expensive psuedoscience treatments that don’t even work. Sometime for their kids. Sometimes for conditions that are actually easy to treat but lethal if you don’t treat it properly
The US healthcare system is designed to maximize the profits of insurance and pharmaceutical companies. It is not designed, however, to care about health. After all, the glorious divinity of the free market means that if companies whose job is related to healthcare are making a lot of profit, then it follows health must be excellent, because profits are the single and only measure of performances. Right? That’s the dogma’s everyone is brainwashed with, so it must be true…
David
It’s not dogma but ideology. Dogma dictates what you have to believe, ideology is how things are being run. The U.S. has embraced capitalism which employs avarice as the principal driving force running the country, with a legal system acting as a comparatively loose escapement mechanism.
A lack of profit is an indication for the driving force not being effective and the operation needing fixing or greasing.
If that sounds fucked up, it’s because it is. It also is successful, and it’s not like wars and other outlets of avarice were an invention of capitalism. Capitalism has only optimized them.
Ob
The US healthcare system is great for those outside the US, who get to benefit from all the advancements made in medicine for free. (A lot of which are funded by the masses of money collected by the US healthcare system).
Logan Hawkes
Well, that’s great! If we go to a single-payer system they’ll have to pick up the slack.
BBCC
Won’t be too hard. Other countries are already catching up and about half of the most advanced hospitals in the world aren’t in the US.
Raen
And those advanced hospitals pay peanuts. No one’s going to “pick up the slack” because no one would want to.
someone
lol @ “for free”, I guess you’ve never heard about a thing called “patents”.
I also guess you don’t know that there are medical universities and pharmaceutical companies outside of the US, and that they do their fair share of innovation because, guess what, they need to be competitive so as to survive.
BBCC
^ Also this.
ditrysia
Yes, and not just patents. Advancements in science and technology aren’t made available everywhere automatically at once just because somewhere someone made the discovery. There’s a lot of forces at play of how that gets transmitted. (Check out the work by Paul M. Romer, this year’s Nobel prize winner).
If the US was putting all of the costs but the rest of the world was benefitting “FOR FREE”, the US, the most profit-driven and petty nation in the world, would have stopped investing there a long time ago. It would make no sense.
This idea of a sector of the population in the US where you can just ignore what the rest of the world is doing, then simultaneously look back and go “you’re not doing anything! we’re pulling all the weight here!” is quite exhausting. It’s like there’s a simultaneous martyr and saviour complex.
Jon Rich
“It’s like there’s a simultaneous martyr and saviour complex.”
Yeah, America in a nutshell, right there. Certain segments of it, anyways.
LynneB
Ob, I live in the UK. Some of the world’s most amazing medical advances have come from here — here, with the NHS.
The first full-body MRI scanner
Cancer immunotherapies
currently, the development of an artificial uterus (for the treatment of extremely premature babies)
…just to name a few.
Some of the world’s most successful drugs have been and are being developed outside the US. In fact, there have been specific, detailed studies to determine whether the US pharmaceutical profits are disproportionately funding R&D (like https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2866602/) — and the short answer is, no, the US contribution to drug development is large but in no way either overwhelming or disproportionate.
The short version is this: the profits that the US pharmaceutical companies and insurers make are not ploughed back in to R&D. They are overwhelmingly sucked out of the system to profit shareholders.
Raen
Oh, yeah, there’s loads of wonderful research done outside the US… funded by selling it inside the US. People bizarrely miss the point when this is said – of course other countries do good research. Then the fruits of that research get sold around the world, and it’s economically viable because one large country’s getting hosed.
You overestimate the comments, granted this is definitely a moment where I have no patience for Walky even though I normally try to defend him. Part of that may be from my own experience as an older sibling though.
Why would we? Like. I mean, I get it. Especially at that age, siblings can be shitty to each other and Walky *thinks* he’s just fucking around, but for instance – that last panel has a pretty nasty subtext knowing what we know about how Sal was treated by her parents.
To Walky’s defense, however slight it might be, he didn’t realize how differently their parents treated them until he got to college. So while what he’s doing here is still shitty, and the fact that he never realized it is also something that counts against him, he isn’t doing it out of spite. I realize that isn’t much, and I have been in Sal’s position(though not nearly to the same degree) so again it I still would love to see her thump him a good one.
BBCC
I’ve never even been in Sal’s position, but if it were me, Walky’d STILL be walking around with a bright red handprint on his face.
Reltzik
Only if you catch him, and given that you’d be twins you’d only have an edge in doing so if you’d spent most of your life running around all athletic-like while he spent most of his life bumming around in front of a television scarfing down unhealthy snacks.
….
…. waaaaait…..
BBCC
Sal does wear a couple of shirts that seem to be work out shirts (like ‘fitness’).
Mr D phone posting
Let me tell you something as an older brother:
This is normal. Your work as siblings is annoy the shit out of each other. Needle each other. Love each other.
He’s def being an awful little shit here, but I’m not sure he realizes how awful exactly. Not that that makes it any better, but just in general this is standard “horrible preteen boy” awful and not “wow Walky’s a terrible person forever” awful
Same. It’s honestly kind of sad that he has no empathy for this godawful situation, and I entirely blame his parents until I see reason otherwise, but Sal is definitely getting the worse of it.
Regalli
Betting that tuning out Sal’s emotional talk was at least partly a ‘I don’t want to think about how angry she is at Mom and whether or not she’s right’ thing, for a start.
Also the toxic masculinity, but parental expectations and modeling shape that too.
BBCC
The strip in question has him say that ’emotional feel feel crap’ is too complicated for him to navigate, so he tunes it out to get in less trouble. Sounds like Sal tried to talk to him, he didn’t understand and she got frustrated, so he tunes her out now. Or, alternatively, he tried to say something when she and her parents were fighting, got told to ‘mind his business’ or something like that and so tuned it out.
I definitely would be willing to cut him some slack! The slack being “well, this is more cruel than he cares to know, but he’s just a kid so maybe he will grow out of that.”
……
Right so Walky is the bratty little brother getting his sister in trouble. Not really surprised by that. And yes I DO love extended flashback sequences why do you ask?
Wait. . .It just clicked . . .did Sal try to rob that gas station to get the rest of the money for Marcie? That . . .is both heartwarming and heartbreaking.
That’s been the general assumption for a while now, although it’s of course always possible that it’s a red herring and Willis is going to throw us a curve ball.
That seems like a bit of a mixed metaphor, unless you’re from Melmac.
Mbunk
Nothing mixed about that metaphor at all. The curveball is a red herring. That’s the twist. You expect a ball and instead they throw a fish at you with some wicked spin on it. Boom red herring curveball.
David
Lew Zealand all over. “I throw the fish away, and it comes back to me.”
Puppethead
I appreciate you so much for that reference
Durandal_1707
Well, it was meant to be two separate metaphors, not one mixed one, but that works too I guess. 😛
Puts a pretty small limit on how much older, though. 🙂
BBCC
Still older enough that she refers to him as her ‘lil bro’.
insomniac
Even if he came out first, he’s still the lil’ bro.
Lokitsu
I wonder if that’s a dominance play on Sal’s part. I grew up with fraternal twins as neighbors and neither ever referred to the other as the “little sibling”.
ischemgeek
I grew up with fraternal triplets as cousins. There is one they consider the “baby”, and there’s one who’s widely treated as the oldest, even though they were born literally less than two full minutes apart (emergency C-section). I also had two friends who were identical twins, and another two who were fraternal twins. Neither set of twins had an “older” kid except as a joke when we were little. When they were 8, the girl of the set of fraternal twins developed T1 diabetes. After that, her brother started calling himself her “big bro” and taking on more of a caretaker role.
From my experience, it seems to depend a lot on whether the parents treat one kid as younger or otherwise baby one kid over the others, and also on whether one kid has a health issue. In both cases where a “baby” developed, the “baby” had a health issue (CP and spina bifida in one case, diabetes in the other), but also, in the fraternal twins, the kid with CP and spina bifida wasn’t the only kid with health issues, just the one who got babied for it. If the parents treat one kid as younger, the kids will pick up on it and respond accordingly (which seems to be what Walky is taking advantage of here), even if they don’t register it consciously.
Side note: In every family that plays favorites that I’ve encountered, the kid(s) who’s not the favorite always knows who the favorite is. The kid who is the favorite almost always thinks they’re treated fairly. If that aint a great metaphor for privilege dynamics in society, I don’t know what is.
BBCC
Really? Every set of twins I’ve known of knew who was ‘technically’ oldest.
BBCC
On that note – I’ve seen a lot of stories about mixed race twins, where one looked or even was just considered ‘whiter’. They tended to consider themselves ‘mixed’ or ‘beige’. Meanwhile, the other twin almost always called themselves ‘Black/Latina/South Asian/etc.’
ischemgeek
Oh they know who is oldest they just don’t give one the family status of oldest, if that makes sense.
BBCC
Fair enough, though in my experience, the oldest likes to (at least try) to act like it (in the ‘boss siblings around’ sense).
Yeah I really think this will be the origin of all that. These are the main points that support that.
– Sal sees the injury as her fault.
– One of her first concerns when talking with her father was about money.
– She gave Marcie her allowance and said she’ll get more.
– Sal doesn’t look like the kid who wants money for herself.
– Sal doesn’t seem to resort to violence except for defense or vengeance, but not one to rob a store for the fun of it.
Yeah, it seems pretty clear at this point.
I’m kind of disappointed. I’d liked the idea of a Sal who really was just acting out and getting on a bad path, but who’d managed to straighten herself out. Not sure I like the revelation that she really was just desperately trying to do good all along – even if she went about it in a bad way.
We’ll see how it plays out. Hopefully Willis can pull it off in a way that satisfies me. 🙂
BBCC
We know that lashing out against her parents was at least part of it – it’s why she didn’t wear a mask, because she wanted to get caught. I suspect after the first one (which is likely for Marcie), we’re going to see some Grade A Fuckery from Linda and/or Charles.
231 thoughts on “Gofundme”
Ana Chronistic
Gofundme is the worst national healthcare plan
Marsh Maryrose
First, you are correct.
Second, I actually had to google to find out if GoFundMe actually existed in the floating timeline, and yes it did. (It was about two years old as of tonight’s posting.)
Zaxares
It is. There’s actually a lot of sad stories about people who turned to GoFundMe or other crowdfunding sites in a last ditch attempt to try and scrape together the money they needed. There’s one particular story I remember about a guy who tried to get the money for just 1 month’s supply of insulin. He failed to get enough… And he died later that month from diabetic-related complications. And that’s just one of the many, many failures who never make it “viral” enough to cover their expenses.
van Ryswyk
What even worse is that the popular goFundme are of for tragic tales of people turning away from medicine to try for hyper-expensive psuedoscience treatments that don’t even work. Sometime for their kids. Sometimes for conditions that are actually easy to treat but lethal if you don’t treat it properly
ditrysia
The US healthcare plan is barbaric and an international embarrassment.
Sincerely,
Someone in the third world who didn’t have to pay a cent for her cancer treatment.
someone
The US healthcare system is designed to maximize the profits of insurance and pharmaceutical companies. It is not designed, however, to care about health. After all, the glorious divinity of the free market means that if companies whose job is related to healthcare are making a lot of profit, then it follows health must be excellent, because profits are the single and only measure of performances. Right? That’s the dogma’s everyone is brainwashed with, so it must be true…
David
It’s not dogma but ideology. Dogma dictates what you have to believe, ideology is how things are being run. The U.S. has embraced capitalism which employs avarice as the principal driving force running the country, with a legal system acting as a comparatively loose escapement mechanism.
A lack of profit is an indication for the driving force not being effective and the operation needing fixing or greasing.
If that sounds fucked up, it’s because it is. It also is successful, and it’s not like wars and other outlets of avarice were an invention of capitalism. Capitalism has only optimized them.
Ob
The US healthcare system is great for those outside the US, who get to benefit from all the advancements made in medicine for free. (A lot of which are funded by the masses of money collected by the US healthcare system).
Logan Hawkes
Well, that’s great! If we go to a single-payer system they’ll have to pick up the slack.
BBCC
Won’t be too hard. Other countries are already catching up and about half of the most advanced hospitals in the world aren’t in the US.
Raen
And those advanced hospitals pay peanuts. No one’s going to “pick up the slack” because no one would want to.
someone
lol @ “for free”, I guess you’ve never heard about a thing called “patents”.
I also guess you don’t know that there are medical universities and pharmaceutical companies outside of the US, and that they do their fair share of innovation because, guess what, they need to be competitive so as to survive.
BBCC
^ Also this.
ditrysia
Yes, and not just patents. Advancements in science and technology aren’t made available everywhere automatically at once just because somewhere someone made the discovery. There’s a lot of forces at play of how that gets transmitted. (Check out the work by Paul M. Romer, this year’s Nobel prize winner).
If the US was putting all of the costs but the rest of the world was benefitting “FOR FREE”, the US, the most profit-driven and petty nation in the world, would have stopped investing there a long time ago. It would make no sense.
This idea of a sector of the population in the US where you can just ignore what the rest of the world is doing, then simultaneously look back and go “you’re not doing anything! we’re pulling all the weight here!” is quite exhausting. It’s like there’s a simultaneous martyr and saviour complex.
Jon Rich
“It’s like there’s a simultaneous martyr and saviour complex.”
Yeah, America in a nutshell, right there. Certain segments of it, anyways.
LynneB
Ob, I live in the UK. Some of the world’s most amazing medical advances have come from here — here, with the NHS.
The first full-body MRI scanner
Cancer immunotherapies
currently, the development of an artificial uterus (for the treatment of extremely premature babies)
…just to name a few.
Some of the world’s most successful drugs have been and are being developed outside the US. In fact, there have been specific, detailed studies to determine whether the US pharmaceutical profits are disproportionately funding R&D (like https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2866602/) — and the short answer is, no, the US contribution to drug development is large but in no way either overwhelming or disproportionate.
The short version is this: the profits that the US pharmaceutical companies and insurers make are not ploughed back in to R&D. They are overwhelmingly sucked out of the system to profit shareholders.
Raen
Oh, yeah, there’s loads of wonderful research done outside the US… funded by selling it inside the US. People bizarrely miss the point when this is said – of course other countries do good research. Then the fruits of that research get sold around the world, and it’s economically viable because one large country’s getting hosed.
Sporky
Wow, Walky, way to be a shitty brother
Durandal_1707
Yeah, no kidding.
LeslieBean4Shizzle
Not to mention a shitty unintentional inspiration for the robbery spree (if two can be considered a spree).
Durandal_1707
You know, though, someday Walky’s probably going to have kids of his own… and when he does, some Christmas…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EyCJZCejFXo
Revenge is a dish best served cold.
Cheshrin
God damn it, Walky.
Doctor_Who
Correct gravatar.
Meta
Fuckin…. walky….
Foxhack
That’s… awful. 🙁
Bagge
Wow, seeing Walky as a kid really hammers home how much he has changed.
Just look at that completely different behavior.
Needfuldoer
And the untied shoes, and junk food addiction… It’s like he’s a completely different person!
David
Says the cerial killer.
Yumi
Fuck yeah, give me that flashback.
Sporky
Also it’s ,so weird to see someone calling Sal “Sally”. Unsettling, even.
Reltzik
Does she look like a fuckin’ Sally to you?
Reltzik
….. aaaand html doesn’t like bold inside of links, apparently.
Needfuldoer
It should, unless the comment system parses it out for some reason.
Reltzik
It’s entirely possible that I found a different way to screw up html.
DailyBrad
I’m sure the comment section is going to cut Walky some slack, given he is like 12-13 here.
…okay, probably not.
BBCC
12’s old enough to know better than to be a dick in this situation.
Kyrik Michalowski
You overestimate the comments, granted this is definitely a moment where I have no patience for Walky even though I normally try to defend him. Part of that may be from my own experience as an older sibling though.
Sporky
Why would we? Like. I mean, I get it. Especially at that age, siblings can be shitty to each other and Walky *thinks* he’s just fucking around, but for instance – that last panel has a pretty nasty subtext knowing what we know about how Sal was treated by her parents.
Kyrik Michalowski
To Walky’s defense, however slight it might be, he didn’t realize how differently their parents treated them until he got to college. So while what he’s doing here is still shitty, and the fact that he never realized it is also something that counts against him, he isn’t doing it out of spite. I realize that isn’t much, and I have been in Sal’s position(though not nearly to the same degree) so again it I still would love to see her thump him a good one.
BBCC
I’ve never even been in Sal’s position, but if it were me, Walky’d STILL be walking around with a bright red handprint on his face.
Reltzik
Only if you catch him, and given that you’d be twins you’d only have an edge in doing so if you’d spent most of your life running around all athletic-like while he spent most of his life bumming around in front of a television scarfing down unhealthy snacks.
….
…. waaaaait…..
BBCC
Sal does wear a couple of shirts that seem to be work out shirts (like ‘fitness’).
Mr D phone posting
Let me tell you something as an older brother:
This is normal. Your work as siblings is annoy the shit out of each other. Needle each other. Love each other.
Shiro
He’s def being an awful little shit here, but I’m not sure he realizes how awful exactly. Not that that makes it any better, but just in general this is standard “horrible preteen boy” awful and not “wow Walky’s a terrible person forever” awful
BBCC
Yeah, like I think Walky’s saying something terrible here, but I don’t hate him now or anything.
not someone else
Same. It’s honestly kind of sad that he has no empathy for this godawful situation, and I entirely blame his parents until I see reason otherwise, but Sal is definitely getting the worse of it.
Regalli
Betting that tuning out Sal’s emotional talk was at least partly a ‘I don’t want to think about how angry she is at Mom and whether or not she’s right’ thing, for a start.
Also the toxic masculinity, but parental expectations and modeling shape that too.
BBCC
The strip in question has him say that ’emotional feel feel crap’ is too complicated for him to navigate, so he tunes it out to get in less trouble. Sounds like Sal tried to talk to him, he didn’t understand and she got frustrated, so he tunes her out now. Or, alternatively, he tried to say something when she and her parents were fighting, got told to ‘mind his business’ or something like that and so tuned it out.
Strip in question:
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2013/comic/book-3/03-answers-in-hennessy/to-navigate/
3oranges
I definitely would be willing to cut him some slack! The slack being “well, this is more cruel than he cares to know, but he’s just a kid so maybe he will grow out of that.”
……
CJ
If this wasn’t a flashback, we might even buy that
William Leonard Reese Jr.
Right so Walky is the bratty little brother getting his sister in trouble. Not really surprised by that. And yes I DO love extended flashback sequences why do you ask?
Wait. . .It just clicked . . .did Sal try to rob that gas station to get the rest of the money for Marcie? That . . .is both heartwarming and heartbreaking.
Durandal_1707
That’s been the general assumption for a while now, although it’s of course always possible that it’s a red herring and Willis is going to throw us a curve ball.
Wizard
That seems like a bit of a mixed metaphor, unless you’re from Melmac.
Mbunk
Nothing mixed about that metaphor at all. The curveball is a red herring. That’s the twist. You expect a ball and instead they throw a fish at you with some wicked spin on it. Boom red herring curveball.
David
Lew Zealand all over. “I throw the fish away, and it comes back to me.”
Puppethead
I appreciate you so much for that reference
Durandal_1707
Well, it was meant to be two separate metaphors, not one mixed one, but that works too I guess. 😛
Lokitsu
Except that Walky isn’t the bratty little brother; he’s Sal’s twin. He’s pretty much a callous, clueless spoiled brat- just like most kids his age.
BBCC
Sal’s the older twin.
3oranges
Puts a pretty small limit on how much older, though. 🙂
BBCC
Still older enough that she refers to him as her ‘lil bro’.
insomniac
Even if he came out first, he’s still the lil’ bro.
Lokitsu
I wonder if that’s a dominance play on Sal’s part. I grew up with fraternal twins as neighbors and neither ever referred to the other as the “little sibling”.
ischemgeek
I grew up with fraternal triplets as cousins. There is one they consider the “baby”, and there’s one who’s widely treated as the oldest, even though they were born literally less than two full minutes apart (emergency C-section). I also had two friends who were identical twins, and another two who were fraternal twins. Neither set of twins had an “older” kid except as a joke when we were little. When they were 8, the girl of the set of fraternal twins developed T1 diabetes. After that, her brother started calling himself her “big bro” and taking on more of a caretaker role.
From my experience, it seems to depend a lot on whether the parents treat one kid as younger or otherwise baby one kid over the others, and also on whether one kid has a health issue. In both cases where a “baby” developed, the “baby” had a health issue (CP and spina bifida in one case, diabetes in the other), but also, in the fraternal twins, the kid with CP and spina bifida wasn’t the only kid with health issues, just the one who got babied for it. If the parents treat one kid as younger, the kids will pick up on it and respond accordingly (which seems to be what Walky is taking advantage of here), even if they don’t register it consciously.
Side note: In every family that plays favorites that I’ve encountered, the kid(s) who’s not the favorite always knows who the favorite is. The kid who is the favorite almost always thinks they’re treated fairly. If that aint a great metaphor for privilege dynamics in society, I don’t know what is.
BBCC
Really? Every set of twins I’ve known of knew who was ‘technically’ oldest.
BBCC
On that note – I’ve seen a lot of stories about mixed race twins, where one looked or even was just considered ‘whiter’. They tended to consider themselves ‘mixed’ or ‘beige’. Meanwhile, the other twin almost always called themselves ‘Black/Latina/South Asian/etc.’
ischemgeek
Oh they know who is oldest they just don’t give one the family status of oldest, if that makes sense.
BBCC
Fair enough, though in my experience, the oldest likes to (at least try) to act like it (in the ‘boss siblings around’ sense).
Geeky Warrior
Yeah I really think this will be the origin of all that. These are the main points that support that.
– Sal sees the injury as her fault.
– One of her first concerns when talking with her father was about money.
– She gave Marcie her allowance and said she’ll get more.
– Sal doesn’t look like the kid who wants money for herself.
– Sal doesn’t seem to resort to violence except for defense or vengeance, but not one to rob a store for the fun of it.
thejeff
Yeah, it seems pretty clear at this point.
I’m kind of disappointed. I’d liked the idea of a Sal who really was just acting out and getting on a bad path, but who’d managed to straighten herself out. Not sure I like the revelation that she really was just desperately trying to do good all along – even if she went about it in a bad way.
We’ll see how it plays out. Hopefully Willis can pull it off in a way that satisfies me. 🙂
BBCC
We know that lashing out against her parents was at least part of it – it’s why she didn’t wear a mask, because she wanted to get caught. I suspect after the first one (which is likely for Marcie), we’re going to see some Grade A Fuckery from Linda and/or Charles.
ShinyNeen