As someone new to Lemmy, thanks for asking this. I just joined lemm.ee from a Reddit link, and I don’t know all the different flavors of the different domains.

NGL, I’m pretty sad to lose this handle.

If you’re making minimum wage, what do you really have to lose by improving your marketable skills?

I mean, I don’t see how it’s possible if you’re only going to have entry level skills… You’re not really building up a wealth of marketable skills if you quit all the jobs after a year.

I think the problem might be how quickly you quit to do it. It takes a good year to train a new person to be productive. If they only get about a year of productivity from you after training you for a year (and a junior level amount of productivity at that), then it’s not worth their time and effort to invest in you. If you did it every 5-7 years instead, it would probably go over better. That’s long enough to see whole projects through to completion and then just take a break in between.

There’s also the issue of how long you take off. If you take off 6 months to a year, it’s less likely that new technology comes in and changes everything than if you take off 2 years. Ex: 2 years from today you can expect huge swaths of industries to adopt using AI tools in day-to-day tasks. Another ex: I’m an engineer, not a CS person. I’ve helped design computer systems, but sophisticated coding isn’t the main part of my job. In the last 3ish years I’ve seen every system I’ve encountered switch to containerization.

Your comment made me look up the way Maryland does it, and yes, it varies a lot by county.

Have you received care from EMS without being taken to the hospital? The case posted by OP did not involve going to the hospital, and so I used an example that did not involve going to the hospital. I had a vague impression that if you require transport to a hospital, you are more likely to be billed for it.

It’s not that I disagree that our system is shit, it’s more that it seems puritanical to require the US to be totally standardized across all 50 states. We’re 50 different states because we don’t like each other, and the animosity is growing. It’s enough to maintain the union with crazy red states trying to role back rights and illegally imprison people.

I don’t see Europeans standardizing social programs across all the different countries within the EU. Germany was loathe to even lend money to Greece following the 2008 recession.

I am not going to defend the US Healthcare industry, but EMS is often? usually? a service of your local government in the US.

Here in Maryland, our ambulance are stored in the firehouses next to the fire engines and staffed by the firemen… Paid for by the county.

When I went to Austin for a bachelorette party, one of the girls passed out and hit her head and the ambulance that came to check her out was also free of charge paid for by the city. Now, their dismissive paternalism was also free of charge because it was Texas, but my point is: emergency services are frequently not part of the predatory American healthcare industry.

Exactly. Hence the name distinguishing it as the “American” one… People (Americans?) are so dumb.