Comments by "SepherStar" (@SepherStar) on "VICE News" channel.

+OCTANE91 I'm sorry you feel that "blacks and mexicans" get more rights than others, but it just isn't true. The only laws in this country that favors one race over others are laws pertaining to Native Americans, primarily concerning reservations and benefit entitlements. Maybe try seeing people as people first rather than a race.
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I can't afford to live in my home town. It's unfortunate but my parents didn't buy a house there when they could have and my neighbors who did have every right to sell their house for whatever price it goes for. What's happening in some areas along the west coast though, is real estate has become a place for out of state and foreign investors to park their money, and this prices local populations out of the buyer market, giving them no other option but to rent. It also drives up rents though, and that, in turn, causes less money to pump through most other sectors of the economy and makes the trickle of the trickle effect a lot less of a trickle.
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My grandparents used to live in an area which my grandmother referred to as "the boonies" with dirt lots and orchards everywhere. There are now no dirt lots or orchards. Just multi million dollar houses and soccer mom's who all got their nose at the same doctor, and drive Land Rovers.
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If she only ate out and spent $15 per day doing it, that's $450 per month. Pricey for me but I'm small and can get away with $250 to $350 per month.
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I only rarely hear that?
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Isn't minimum wage there like $22/hour? I have friends there who work what would be a $7/hour job here, which means poverty, and they manage to travel a lot....and not just to Asia.
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+Enayze I don't know about the east coast but the high cost of living on the west coast is not due to taxes. It's due to supply and demand and the fact that the housing market is, in most areas, a free market. The taxes are chump change compared to rents.
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Sparse state? "2 hours or so" from any place in my state is about 30 different places.
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People blame this on the ACA but I've had private insurance since long before the ACA and the insurance companies have always been price gauging bastards. My premium has only gone up except the one time state regulators could do something about it, and the increases after the ACA was passed have been indistinguishable from the ones before it was passed. At this point, they can really just cut all the "rising prices of healthcare B.S." or of their premium hike letters and say "We want more money, because money, so we're raising our rates, lolz :-)"
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+Big Boy I would take running around in loin cloths to being the victims of genocide.
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A lot of employers would like his style...Trader Joe's, Whole Foods, Apple, T-Mobile, a lot of companies who wish to appeal to young adults. In fact, I don't think he'd have a problem even getting an office type job. But I doubt he needs that because he's a pretty good guitar player and there are plenty of places in California for him to make money playing his music. Of course for all we know, he could be a doctor or lawyer or professional of some type anyway.
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Part of the problem is these companies setting up shop in high priced 'trendy" areas to attract young workers. It's kind of dumb though if you go to college to get a good job (to make enough money to live comfortably) and end up having just as much expendable income as you would in minimum wage in economically depressed middle of nowhere USA.
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Ok we will all move to your state.
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+john I'm quite sure they would have preferred being left unconquered.
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Un-greatful how? They were mis-lead at their expense. They spent a whole day waiting to get money someone told them they would get, and many of them probably spent their last bit of change on bus fare just to get down to that area. What if you were really in a bind for money and had $5 to your name and someone said "Hey, come down here and I'll buy you lunch and then give you $300." And then you spent your last $5 getting down there to meet him, he buys you lunch, and then says "About that $300, I was just kidding" Well you could have gotten lunch without being out your last $5 and stuck across town.
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The problem with drug addicts is they don't sit there in their house getting high and not bothering anyone. They create mayhem and often do dangerous and criminal things when under the influence. They often cannot maintain employment and will steal and rob to obtain money for their addiction. Lifting the prohibition didn't reduce the number of alcoholics, it just made it unprofitable for organized crime syndicates. Because alcohol is so easily obtainable, homeless alcoholics fair significantly worse than homeless drug addicts, and create more problems. Drug addicts sober up on a fairly regular basis due to the fact that it's not as easy to obtain drugs as it is alcohol. Homeless drug addicts will use this sober time to attend to personal hygiene and personal and business affairs. Homeless alcoholics have access to a steady, unbroken conveyor belt of alcohol. They never sober up and their hygiene, state of mind, and quality of life suffer significantly because of it. They are significantly more likely than homeless drug addicts to completely forgo personal hygiene and care, live in clothes soiled with urine, vomit, and feces, and urinate and defecate on streets, sidewalks and buildings. San Diego is having a deadly hepatitis A outbreak for this very reason. They have had to pressure clean the sidewalks with a bleach solution in an effort to prevent the virus from spreading, as it's easily communicable.
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Look at San Francisco. Full of gays and liberals and gay liberals and liberal gays and absolutely fabulous. Detroit is falling apart because it's only industry up and left.
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I wouldn't actually be a landlord in a place like that. When people don't keep their properties up, it causes the entire neighborhood to devalue.
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HuMAN Nationalist Most American Romanichal gypsies are fair skinned, and the reason for this is likely intermarriage with the general European population, not kidnapping.
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Maybe they aren't married.
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+Infinite That might be a factor. But Mexico has a very different history than the US, and I think colonization by the Spanish, and their class system can explain a lot of the poverty in Mexico that exists today. I've noticed a peasant mentality among some Mexicans that I think is a remnant of that.
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Iktomeone I guess it depends on your definition of "own" and "stole". The west coast and Mexico were colonized by the Spanish, and that's why Spanish is prevalent in the region. Of course Spanish overthrew the already destabilized Aztec Empire, and herded various different (and sometimes warring) native American groups into missions where most died of disease, and then the land was granted to those deemed deserving of it. The Mexican American war was precluded by the declaration of the independence of Texas, which sought to secede from the newly formed Centralist Republic of Mexico for various reasons, and the United States won the Mexican American war because the Centralist Republic of Mexico was not a particularly stable. The US did not keep all of the territory claimed (kind of ironic isn't it, being 1/3 of Mexicans would rather live in the US), but either way, whether it was the US claiming land or Mexico claiming land, it was Europeans taking land from indigenous people one way or another.
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People can end up on the street fast in the U.S. and Americans often don't have the family safety net as people in other countries.
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Some people have addictive personalities and psychological problems, mental health issues or personality disorders that can't be fixed. I see absolutely nothing wrong with offering them the choice to sterilize themselves. Notice they don't get the money then and there. They have to have the procedure done first. They will likely have to not be under the influence when the procedure is done and will be of sound mind at the time to decide to go through with it. Particularly of they are crack addicts, as many of these women are. That is a very short high.
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+Horny Aleks Yeah, what's your point?
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Most drug users are 1. In denial that they have a problem, and 2. Underestimate the impact of their problems on others. I've had the misfortune of knowing a lot of drug addicts. All kinds of drugs, and it was always the pot smokers who were the worst to interact with. Crack addicts and heroin addicts, they have a time and place for their drugs. When they are drugged up, they know they are impaired, and they are sober for big chunks of time, but pot addicts don't have a time and place. They are like prescription pain killer addicts who try to go about their day under the influence, and they don't think it's a big deal. In fact they don't think that anything is a big deal, even when it is to others, because that's what pot does. It makes you think that nothing is a big deal, and makes you emotionally unavailable. That can have very profound and negative affects on those around you. I saw a documentary about a lady with cerebral palsy who was trying to get pot legalized. Her fiance had committed suicide. They had gotten into a verbal argument and she told him he was worse than the man who had raped her. He was so upset about this that he locked himself in the bathroom, and instead of talking it out, she kept urging him to come downstairs to smoke some pot. He committed suicide in the bathroom. And after recounting this story she added that if he had just come down stairs and smoked some pot, everything would have been fine. She completely discounted his feelings and the hurt she had caused him. She completely brushed it off because pot made her think that what she said wasn't a big deal, and pot was a solution to everything for her.
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I had a neighbor who was a drug addict and raised in the foster care system. Her biological parents were drug addicts and had 9 kids between them, all had to be taken into state care. You can have an substance abuse problem and you can be a parent but you shouldn't be both at the same time.
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Most women don't drink during pregnancy because it can cause fetal alcohol syndrome. If they do drink, it's typically a single class of wine. I'm sure some women smoke pot while pregnant but I don't think it's very widespread.
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A surprisingly large number of children in the foster care system don't have birth certificates or SSNs because no one ever bothered to obtain them for them. When these kids age out of the system, they are screwed to high heaven, being unable to obtain legal employment and not having the resources to navigate the system and obtain their proper documentation. In some instances, they can never obtain the proper documentation because of witness requirements and statute of limitations on time to file for a birth certificate.
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I hate that eye thing too.
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My dad rented this tiny hole in the wall office space in an industrial area. It used to be a garage. He managed to fit a reception area and two exam rooms in it, and it was just him and an office assistant. He didn't take insurance and was able to charge about $75 per visit because he had such low overhead. I used to take my cat to a vet with the same type of set up. Teeny tiny office space that used to be a storage area. People waited outside but it was nice because the animals didn't realize they were at the vet, so were a lot more relaxed, and the prices were really low because of the low overhead. Despite it's appearances it was a popular place with some pretty affluent people because it was walk in only. You don't need a fancy office. You just need a place to have an office. Come to think of it, shouldn't doctor's offices have outside waiting rooms? Wouldn't that minimize the spread of germs?
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+Hey Arnold It's not possible for everyone to move out of the state. Last time I moved just down the street it cost me almost $3,000. First month, security deposit and the moving truck, movers, packing supplies, and mileage. It's impossible to move if you can't save enough money to do it. That was the situation one of my neighbors was in. She was trapped in the state until a friend from out of state helped her out.
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Iktomeone Apparently that's what you would like me to imply so you can have something to be mad and outraged at. What makes you think Mexico had any more of a rightful claim to the land than the US? Because between the two European based entities (yes, Spaniards are European), Mexico claimed (aka stole) it first? The rightful claimants of the land were the native tribal people who inhabited it, but they could not defend that right.
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I pay about $500 per month for insurance + $100 per month out of pocket expenses. have friends in the EU who would rather die than pay $30 out of pocket for medication their government health system doesn't cover.
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+OCTANE91 I understand that you feel that "black and Mexicans score a lot lower than whites and still get the same degree" and if that were the case it would certainly be unfair, but it's not the case. Colleges and universities have GPA policies which are applied uniformly throughout the program of study. At my university, in my particular program, a passing grade was a D but to graduate and receive a degree, you had to maintain a GPA above 2.0. That applied to everyone. Most masters programs in my field require a GPA of at least 3.0. And that also applies to everyone. There are ethnicity and race based scholarships offered by private organizations or trusts that anyone can set up. That being said, I've seen as many for students of specific European heritages as I have for black and latino students. Because there is always competition for scholarships, there are always merit requirements as well, and often requirements as to the type of institution you are at, your field of study, and so on. Are you of Lithuanian heritage? You can find scholarships for Lithuanians at the Lithuanian Foundation. Scottish? Try Scottish Heritage USA. There's even scholarships for children of coal miners, and railway workers, and steel workers. You can look this stuff up. I do seem to recall some students were to upset to take exams due to a noose at some university. I don't know if the university decided to accommodate their requests or not but universities actually accommodate what are considered to be extenuating circumstances all the time, and if they did accommodate these students then they would have also accommodated a white student who was equally upset by the incident. If not because they believed the student, then because they just wanted to avoid the hassle of a legal battle. You know your problem is that you don't challenge your perceptions. Of course if you think others are getting things you aren't, you are going to be upset but your upset was based on false perceptions. There's a scholarship for you based on your heritage if you want one, you just have to find it and then meet the additional criteria.
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Why do families who grew up in middle of nowhere Kansas insist on living in middle of nowhere Kansas? Because that's where they are from, and that's where their life is, and their friends are, and their family is.
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I can only eat half at a time so that would be like buying two $4 sandwiches. If I lived off of sandwiches that would be 45 sandwiches a month, which would be about $360 per month. Not bad.
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+Tom Rong I meet a lot of cab drivers who used to be electrical engineers but didn't keep up with the changing technology. I imagine process design is a little different but as the technology changes, I imagine the process changes a little as well, so I would keep an eye and ear on the frontline if I were you.
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+OnTreader "People of color" is a term for people other than white. Black people, by and large use the terms "white people" or "white folks" more than "whites". Do not school me about the south. I spent a significant part of my life there. It's a nice area with nice people but an unfortunate element to it's history. The motivations to the civil war are irrelevant to me. The enslavement of black people was wrong and it was right to end it regardless of the actual motivations behind doing so. If those were white people who were enslaved, do you think any white person would care about the reasons behind the emancipation?
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Iman Robota: Can't you see the hypocrisy in you? You are getting upset over the removal of a statue of a man who actively worked to keep black people literal slaves as if that oppresses you in anyway, when it doesn't. If you are a person who honest;y care about freedom and civil liberties, how can you honestly look at what happened to black people in this country and not only not support the,, but think what you experience is anything like what they have experienced? Or maybe you are just afraid the tables will turn and non-white people will do to what people what white people what white people in the past and to some extent today do to non-white people? I bet that's it. You are afraid of karma. Well guess what? If instead of putting yourself at odds with those of color, and creating hate, you stood beside them, on the same team, in unity, you would realize that there is no "us and them" unless you create an "us and them". Stop calling then "blacks" and try "black people" and then just "people" and maybe you will find some peace in life.
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+Tyrone Shoelaces People have been toppling statues since people have been erecting statues. American forces toppled a statue of Saddam in Iraq. The Taliban blew up carved statues of Buddha. The Chinese destroyed their own statues of past empires during their drive for modernization and the Egyptians would go on statue smashing sprees from time to time. I believe you when you say you are not a white supremacist but I think you lack the ability to put yourself in the shoes of non-white people who have historically been designated and treated as inferior or even less than human by this country. Do you really blame a black person for toppling a statue of a man who fought to keep black people enslaved? Someone who thought they were too inferior to have rights or be recognized as a human being and relegated them to the status of livestock?
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It must be the dry stuff because that wet stuff has gotten expensive.
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That's crazy. Where I am, the city inspects rentals every 4 years and they had better damn well be up to code or the landlords get fined. If you get evicted, you usually have 30 days to vacate.
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