The interesting thing is Japanese companies generally manufacture cars they sell in America entirely in America, while “American” car companies manufacture their huge polluting machines in Mexico and maybe add one final part in the US so they can claim some work is done in the US. Japanese cars in the US aren’t imported while US cars are.
> The largest automobile manufacturing facility in the world for Toyota, Toyota Motor Manufacturing, Kentucky, Inc. (TMMK) is able to produce 550,000 vehicles and more than 600,000 engines per year. Two years after breaking ground in Georgetown, Kentucky,
> Where are the majority of Toyotas produced?
> The majority of Toyota vehicles you see on the road are made in your own country.
This does read like marketing material from Toyota itself so I don’t know if it’s the most trustworthy. So I look at [2]. Toyota makes 8.1M cars globally.
> the assembly of Toyota vehicles in North America came to around 1.75 million units.
So nearly 20% of worldwide production is assembled in the US. 2.3M cars are sold in the US [3]. So doesn’t seem unreasonable to say that the vast majority of Toyota cars are assembled in the US. It wouldn’t surprise me if that’s more broadly true for other Japanese manufacturers.
Do you have a better explanation of your viewpoint?
Same for Honda. What's fascinating is the fact that Ford's manufacturing is less American than Honda, thanks to NAFTA but far be it to think a good ole fashioned American company like Ford would ever act like a corporation that's in it for the money, and move manufacturing out of the US.
The chickens came home to roost though, when the SEC declared a $196 million penalty in 2020 in import fines for the Ford Transit Connect, which was imported with a back seat, so it was considered a passenger vehicle for import tax reasons. Upon recieving the vans in the US, Ford removed the seats, turning it into a work van, and avoiding the import tax on work vans, something like 22%. Regardless of if it was clever of Ford or dishonest, the real point of my bringing up this story is those vans were made in Turkey.
Much of this has to do with tariffs and point of final manufacturing can be key - so the question becomes if the car is shipped as a almost complete product and finalized or if it is sent as parts or if it built from local components. “Made in America” is not a simple question or answer.
At my previous job, I made the robots that Toyota, Suzuki, etc use in their manufacturing lines and directly installed them inside their factories. My experience is, for the most part, first hand.
The vehicles Japanese companies make for the American and US markets have no overlap. Nothing sold in America is made in Japan, and nothing sold in Japan is made in America. A lot of those vehicles are loaded up into tractor trailers and hauled off to their destination—Japanese tractor trailers that those manufacturers use aren’t large enough to haul American vehicles in Japan. Furthermore, the economics for manufacturing huge vehicles in a tiny country that can barely build for its own needs and shipping across the world wouldn’t make sense. The raw materials, energy, and real estate needed for the factories are simply far cheaper in the US.
> In countries with state controlled healthcare, service is rationed.
Americans really love eating up this meme.
I can get scans any time in Japan and I never wait. If doctors think it’s an emergency, they’ll do whatever scan is necessary then and there. If not, they’ll pull out a calendar and ask me to pick any day that’s convenient for me.
Meanwhile my friends in the US are waiting months for basic shit. My dad visited me in Japan in December and had to visit a dentist for emergency care and was offered to do surgery on the spot. He decided to delay it until he returned to the US. The earliest available appointment in his area is next month.
It’s insanity seeing Americans parrot this stuff. It’s North Korea-level propaganda. Hell, it’s worse. North Koreans have no access to the outside world so you can’t blame them. Americans just actively turn away anything in favor of “well a guy who knows a guy said he saw a guy on tv who heard about a guy who once heard a story about a guy from a guy in another country said those people wait a long time for health care!”
But the strangest thing is countless Americans, including myself, will pop into any thread to talk about how they have endless bad experiences with health care in the US (I’ve been forced to wait forever and then still charged out the ass because my health insurance was randomly rejected), while most bad experiences with other countries is seventh hand info. Americans complaining about health care in countries they’ve never been to far outnumbers people with first hand info—usually the ones with firsthand info are saying “it’s pretty good out there”
As someone who lives in Sweden I can assure you that the 'meme' is 100% true here. There is no way you are getting an MRI unless it's literally life and death, without either waiting 4-6 month or having private health insurance.
As someone who lives in Norway (permanent resident) I'm quite surprised that Sweden is so bad. A couple of years ago I visited my GP complaining of a small hard swelling on my foot. he said it's probably just a ganglion and that he could fix it if it didn't improve by itself but that he would like an MRI scan first to check exactly what it looked like. It was obviously not even slightly urgent but I still got the scan with a month. In Norway such scans are normally performed at a specialist company (Unilabs in this case) even though it is all paid for by the health national service (except for about 150 NOK egenandel, that's about 15 USD copay)
I'm in the US and have had multiple MRI scans happen either the same day as an appointment or the next. Compared to that, even a month seems pretty long.
It wasn't urgent, I wasn't in pain, there was no rush. If it is sufficiently urgent it's possible to get an MRI within minutes of arriving at a major hospital.
Consider that Americans tax payers pay about $5k/year on average for Medicare and Medicaid that most of them don't (yet) qualify for before they even starting to pay those private insurances. People in most other countries can pay a lot privately before getting close to what the average American tax payer pays for healthcare.
The point is that it's an option that is available. Most people in Europe just has a base level health coverage that means most of us don't feel it's justified to take up additional cover.
Yea, don't get me wrong. At the end of the day there is no way I would want to trade the Swedish system for the US system, no matter how flawed I find the Swedish system.
Consider that your experience is not everyone’s experience in America. My American wife was able to get emergency dental care within two hours at a dentist who she’d never seen before.
My Canadian uncle had to wait months for cancer specialists.
Life expectancy in US has more to do with very bad lifestyles of Americans, mostly obesity and drug abuse, than with quality of healthcare, which in fact is superior. We are great at keeping alive very unhealthy people. As a food for thought, consider that Japanese-Americans have higher life expectancy than Japanese in Japan.
> Life expectancy in US has more to do with very bad lifestyles of Americans, mostly obesity and drug abuse, than with quality of healthcare
Obesity, diet and drug abuse are healthcare problems. Dying is a healthcare problem, and that’s why I suggest using average lifespan as a crude measure of population health. Population health is something a unified healthcare system should be tackling, with obesity and addiction help and care.
US healthcare might be superior for some, but population health is poor relative to the cost paid. The expense is spectacular when compared to other countries.
My point is that the reason the American population health is bad not deficiencies in what people typically understand as healthcare system (that is, hospitals, clinics and doctors). If prices tomorrow went down by 90%, and healthcare availability skyrocketed, we’d still have population that’s unhealthily obese and addicted to drugs. At the same time, countries that are much poorer, and have much worse access to healthcare, often have much superior population-level health.
Totally depends. Mostly on where you are in Germany, and to a degree whether you're willing to call a few different doctors. An acquaintance with a shoulder injury got an appointment with an orthopedic specialist within a week, who recommended an MRI. The second hospital she called just happened to have a free MRI slot the next morning.
Personally, I never had to have an MRI, but when I needed to see a specialist for acute back pain, I got an appointment (and a fix) within 24h. I have never in my life waited months for an appointment with any specialist.
This is all on public health insurance (and without any additional charge, ie. the MRI was "free"). Relatives tell me it's much more difficult in other places in Germany; I sometimes wonder if they should just get an appointment here, Germany isn't that big.
Japan doesn’t have a nearby superpower that makes sabotaging your entire economy a yearly campaign point in order to prove your country sucks. Cuba’s had that for well over half a century.
Cuba is in a unique position to be a ridiculously wealthy country. They can flaunt US long-arm jurisdiction (ie: FATCA) and act as a safe heaven for US/EU monies. The embargo on Cuba is pretty much self-imposed by the their current regime.
Yeah, being a criminal safe haven right next to a country that has no problem supporting terrorists and dropping bombs on civilian targets is a wonderful idea. Can’t imagine why they never tried it.
Probably because every powerful economy of the past 6 centuries got there due to strong trade, which the US has gone out of its way to prevent Cuba from doing.
No country with a strong economy got there by being forcibly isolated from the world.
But protectionism is often good and necessary for a country's economy. If country A cannot produce a good x, then another country B can stifle A's technology growth for producing x by selling x outright at a cost A can not produce the good at (yet). If you ban the import/restrict of x from country B, you will have to pay some fixed costs to get the production of x up to speed; but you will end up with cheaper unit costs in the end. The catch is, you can not ban all imports outright because importing the technology to produce x will probably save you years on R&D and related costs. Like everything in economics, doing things are good and bad at the same time.
My parents were straight D/F students and never helped me with classes at all. I would’ve appreciated help that would’ve let me go farther, but that’s at a point well past algebra.
Parents are part of the problem, but it seems like we’re just desperately trying to pin the responsibility on one specific person in the child’s life and put it out of their personal responsibility. That’s not the case. Some kids get everything they need to succeed provided for them and have plenty of assistance and choose to fail. Some have nothing but barriers put all around them and they still bust their ass to succeed.
Today we are graduating an unacceptably large numbers of functional illiterate kids from high school. If a kid graduates high school and they are functionally illiterate, that illustrates neglect by parents over many years. It has nothing to do with the academic background of said parents or whether they themselves can read or write. It has nothing to do with the state of public education, or the quality of teachers - the public system is good enough to teach literacy over 15 years of schooling. The quality of the public system may be important for the last mile of education (where you’re trying to provide kids a richer educational experience), but our bar for success is much much lower.
Put another way, you cannot convince me that the parents are not at fault when a kid can’t read or write after 15 years of education (after having sampled many many teachers and teaching styles, including summer school and remedial education, during that time).
The kid is the one in class choosing not to read. Parents can be destructive influences on kids, but kids also do have free will and destructive influences amongst their peers who they choose to associate with.
It’s a compounding problem and each time we assign blame to one (1) thing, we’re leaving other causes untreated and not making the problem better at all.
I’d say ask find out why they’re saying they don’t want to read and address all those causes.
There are plenty of kids with great parents who are surrounded by awful peers at school and media that glorifies being uneducated. Then you leave 2 bad kids in a class of good kids, and you’ll get endless distractions that cause the others to give up and resent school. You address just one cause and you have countless others. You need to go after a load of issues and it’s honestly more complicated than we want to admit.
If you pin every responsibility to the parents you are just leaving unlucky kids behind. Having someone to blame is not helping kids succeed without much support from the parents. Of course someone will always succeed despite the odds, but the odds are still stacked agains the poor kid. It just entrenches wealth and slows down social mobility.
I was in Borneo last month and saw round lamps in a rainforest covered in swarms of ants at night, all standing equidistant and with their jaws wide open and raised. I picked up a leaf and poked one in the mouth and it immediately clamped shut and other nearby ants rushed over to assist the ant in pulling in the leaf.
It seems like the ants stand on the lamps and wait to catch other insects that fly by then strike in unison. It was an incredible strategy.
I don’t trust that the infrastructure will always work.
I’ve had my cards rejected randomly. Since I travel a lot and mainly use cards abroad, I’ve had my cards rejected more times than not. It’s pretty troublesome to be stranded somewhere and unable to get a hotel or ride a train because your card was rejected.
I always keep a fat wad of cash for that reason. Also that at any time my bank could be shut down, governments or banks could decide I don’t have a right to buy something, power outages could render payments useless, or hackers could easily take down a network if they were motivated (and state-level actors have plenty of motivation now).
This is mostly my reason too. Using payments networks makes you beholden to somebody else and reliant on their systems working properly. But nobody selling you stuff gives a shit about that, if it doesn't work, it's your fault. So it's better to take responsibility and keep cash and not be stuck because of other people's problems.
Concretely, I went across town last year with my wife to try a popular counter-service restaurant. Their payment system wasn't working, and during the time I paid for and waited for my order, they turned away about 10 other people who didn't have cash to pay.
I generally just keep multiple cards from multiple providers. I have a Visa, MasterCard, and Amex, no two from the same bank. I even have a card from a foreign bank. This doesn't solve problems with local infrastructure (e.g., vendor's payment system is down), but it does solve most other issues.
A person who doesn’t believe in religion being sworn in on a religious book is probably just annoyed. They’re not going to feel loyal to it.
Sworn statements as a whole are just entirely symbolic and don’t really guarantee loyalty or honesty, but if someone who doesn’t believe rejects a religious text that they disbelieve and instead choose something that has meaning and value to them, it’s better in the symbolic sense. A scientist swearing in on a scientific text that’s meaningful to them and that also addresses human morality makes as much sense and symbolically reflects their devotion to their mission as a Bible to a devout Christian.
Just last week, when I was at a techno music gathering, a couple of my friends saw a guy in drag (it was more like over the top ball dress really) and were like "whoaa, did you see that".
I had to remind them that we used to have scores of trannies attending these events in the past and and no one cared. But now, after the latest round of propaganda, we, as a society, fear them again.
Alternative cultures have always had alternative niches of events but clubbing in the early days, at least in Europe, was often largely a culture of acceptance. Age, gender, attire, whatever... acceptance was high. As I started to age and dance music became more popular and more commercialised, the number of safe, relaxed and accepting cubs started to shrink as club culture became normal culture. There are still alternative club scenes out there, they are just more protective and secretive to stop the dilution of their culture.
Exactly. Even here in backwards Bulgaria we had large (as in thousands of people) electronic one-night music events where trans/cross/etc people would hang on ropes, perform stuff and generally have a good time along with everyone else.
Some of the best small time events 20 years ago were held in a popular gay. No one cared. No one.
Now it's 2023 and extremists on both ends are accusing you of either showing too much respect to the "weirdos", or not using the most up to date and precise language to describe things that are murky to begin with.
Good point, but you may want to avoid the word 'tranny' when you mean transvestite (or preferably, cross-dresser or drag queen) or transsexual or transgender person. 'Tranny' has been embraced as a hateful slur and is generally considered offensive and derogatory.
Your example hints at a man who dresses like a woman (but usually not transitioning or being uncomfortable with their (day-to-day) manhood), so cross-dresser (or drag queen if it is really over the top, well, drag queenish, which the ballgown sort of implies).
'Tranny' being derogatory isn't really new-speak. The only recent shift I know of is that men who dress up like (feminine) women tend to prefer 'cross-dresser' over 'transvestite' nowadays. The problem with 'tranny' in this context is also that it now mostly refers to transgender people (in a derogatory way) rather than cross-dressers.
Thanks. Have to say cross dresser fits much better given the context. I can no longer edit my post and will have to take the heat instead. Lesson learned.
Are you seriously equating treating people with respect with nuspeak? The post you replied to already answered your question. I'm just going to suggest that you should focus more on respecting others and less on thinking you're debating.
No. It's all about children. Nobody cares what adults do between themselves. Nopbody did, nobody does. Read all those "panic" stories again. It's about the children. Leave them alone.
Every invented moral panic is about “the children.” Rock music, Jewish people “corrupting” the youth, satanists, trans people. It’s sad that people still buy into these stories meant to outrage people and seed divide, anger, and violence. And it’s always pushed by people with clear political and financial agendas picking fringe extreme and uncommon examples pretending it’s everywhere.
Someday you’ll forget this was ever a thing and pretend you never bought into it. It’s what everyone does during every invented outrage. You’ve been told to be angry about some fringe thing and believed it. 10 years from now there’ll be another big thing to be angry about.
You’re not angry “for the children.” Please drop the act.
> Nope. What's you explanation then for why literally nobody cared about adult trans people just a few years ago?
What? They've been trying to ban trans people from bathroom via legislation since before 2014 and have been screaming about pronouns for nearly the same amount of time.
> What's you explanation then for why literally nobody cared about adult trans people just a few years ago?
Because it’s an invented political scapegoat, just like countless others. Trans people were out and about 10 years ago and nobody gave a shit. I’m from a small town in Appalachia and my grandma had a trans friend that was out and open 30 years ago. They stopped by when I was a kid and we treated her as a normal human. Nobody gave a shit.
Social media told you to be angry about people that’ve been around forever. You chose to only pay attention recently and get angry.
Right wing organizations are making huge buckets of cash from donations and “anti-woke” brand campaigns targeting trans people, getting gullible people to think being trans is some new trend and they need to fight back. Normal people have known trans people for several decades and we are absolutely bewildered that people like you are suddenly outraged about people we’ve known all our lives. Same with how 15 years ago ”the gays” were going to destroy the world.
> Social media told you to be angry about people that’ve been around forever. You chose to only pay attention recently and get angry.
Again, no. It's only when they started telling children it was a good idea to sterilize themselves. Just don't do irreversible damage to children, it's that easy. Find other shibboleths to identify good communists that don't involve chopping bits off kids.
You're inventing things people aren't arguing for. The purpose of giving puberty blockers, for example, is to buy time to avoid irreversible damage at a too young age. And yes, to a child whose dysphoria does not resolve, puberty as the wrobg sex is irreversible damage.
If you believe your own arguments, presumably you support them.
Irrelevant. If any significant number of them are "social contagion", then that is an argument for puberty blockers to remove any pressure for more invasive and irreversible changes while the person in question is too young to decide for themselves and have not had a chance to think it through.
Your reasoning is fundamentally flawed, and appears to just seek to justify the extensive harm your immoral stance would result in.
Puberty blockers themselves are not free of risk of irreversible damage, as you very well know.
And if you had to bet money, if I told you some kid started on puberty blockers, what would be the odds they later got surgery or further irreversible damage done? Higher or lower than if they didn't start on puberty blockers, as they did 10 years ago?
If I'm right and social contagion is much more prevalent than "real dysphoria", that is a very relevant point, and makes fighting against the contagion the right thing to do, not dishing out puberty blockers like candy.
Now, you can tell me that you believe there is little social contagion and we'll have to agree to disagree, but don't try to twist your way into roiding kids up, it doesn't make sense. And you know it.
> Puberty blockers themselves are not free of risk of irreversible damage, as you very well know.
Their risk is miniscule compared to the risk of untreated gender dysphoria.
> And if you had to bet money, if I told you some kid started on puberty blockers, what would be the odds they later got surgery or further irreversible damage done? Higher or lower than if they didn't start on puberty blockers, as they did 10 years ago?
Irrelevant, as if they later get surgery it is because they, once they are mature enough to decide, determine that it is the best outcome for them. If that number is higher than 10 years ago it is likely to be because the chance of an outcome that will actually help them will be drastically improved when they've not been forced to endure the massive harm of going through puberty with dysphoria.
Your reasoning is still invalid.
> If I'm right and social contagion is much more prevalent than "real dysphoria", that is a very relevant point, and makes fighting against the contagion the right thing to do, not dishing out puberty blockers like candy.
If social contagion is much more prevalent than "real dysphoria" that would justify trying to fix that, but it would still not justify doing massive harm to those suffering from that dysphoria whether or not caused by social contagion.
Irrespective of the source of the dysphoria, it exists, and it correlates to immense harm when untreated, and so arguing for withholding treatment is deeply immoral.
That you're suggesting this is out of some desire to "roid kids up" is just vile.
> Irrespective of the source of the dysphoria, it exists
No! What you have here is a bunch of confused girls that will do whatever tiktok influencers tell them to do. Do nothing and it'll pass in 99.99% of the cases. Start blocking puberties and you end up with a lot of unnecessary surgeries and sterile people who will suffer the rest of their lives.
How many people temporally confused by social contagion are you willing to sacrifice for each "real case" that you catch earlier? Where's your line? Ten, a hundred? A thousand? All of them?
You don't want to engage with the question, I get it, but it's the whole point here.
> Irrelevant, as if they later get surgery it is because they, once they are mature enough to decide, determine that it is the best outcome for them
Yeah, because the sunk cost fallacy develops only after puberty, or what? No. As you very well know, once they start on that road the identity kicks in and it's "who they are now". Which is exactly what you want, a normal person comes in, an activist for life comes out. Who cares about the actual person, right?
>No! What you have here is a bunch of confused girls that will do whatever tiktok influencers tell them to do. Do nothing and it'll pass in 99.99% of the cases.
The evidence does not support this claim. You're flat out making shit up to argue for denying treatment to people who untreated are at great risk of harm. However, it is right that it resolves for many. This is why puberty blockers are important as a means to minimise harm by reducing the risk either way by failing to accurately asses for whom it will resolve without transitioning.
What you're arguing for is an approach that maximises harm to one of the groups. It is then rather vile when you make this statement:
> How many people temporally confused by social contagion are you willing to sacrifice for each "real case" that you catch earlier? Where's your line? Ten, a hundred? A thousand? All of them?
You've set up a strawman, but you're the one who is willing to sacrifice - in your view 0.01%, but in reality far more - the wellbeing of those for whom it won't pass by arguing against harm reducing treatment.
What we know is that transitioning carries a lower risk of regret than almost all other kinds of cosmetic surgery, which is clear evidence that those who do go ahead with it have gone through a much more rigorous process before going ahead than the cosmetic surgeries pretty much nobody are arguing people shouldn't be able to consent to.
> Yeah, because the sunk cost fallacy develops only after puberty, or what? No. As you very well know, once they start on that road the identity kicks in and it's "who they are now".
Nothing to do with sunk cost, and that you bring it up suggests you're too ignorant to understand the issues.
No, we don't know that, because there's absolutely no evidence to support that. What we actually know is that for a significant number of people, dysphoria does resolve. Hence deferring irreversible changes is important.
At the same time, how very dare you want to tell people who by then are adults what is best for them? This kind of authoritarian, oppressive desire to force your view of what is best for other people on them, despite their wishes is a trait usually found in ideologies like fascism or nazism (fittingly, given the nazis destroyed the first institute focusing on helping trans people)
> Which is exactly what you want, a normal person comes in, an activist for life comes out. Who cares about the actual person, right?
It's exactly because I care about the person I don't want them oppressed by authoritarian people like you who want to strip them of agency over their own life.
It's not the same. Nobody cares what adults do. They do have agency over their own life and I defend their freedom to fuck themselves up in the most creative way they can think up.
But don't go after children. There is a reason they can't legally consent to many things. It's too easy to manipulate children to make really bad decisions they later regret, so at least lets not make irreversible damage.
Sorry, but no. I'm torn between hoping you'll understand once you have children of your own, or hoping you never, ever go anywhere near any child.
You keep moving goalposts. Nobody here has argued for "going after children". Nobody here has argued in favour of more surgeries for children. Exactly the opposite: We've argued for puberty blockers exactly to preserve their ability to choose not to be subjected to immense harm by letting them as much as possible defer decisions until they are old enough to make an informed choice.
I do have children, and that is exactly why your willingness to let children be subjected to immense harm makes me as angry as it does. Your authoritarian, oppressive desire to deprive children of medical treatment is flat out evil to me.
I don’t think communist countries have a higher rate of trans people. Blaming random, irrelevant things on communism is a hallmark sign of believing media fear mongering.
Let me spell it out, maybe it helps somebody else:
- "Communists" is shorthand for "envious losers who'd rather destroy society than improve themselves". "Elite overproduction" is what you want to google. I just think "communist" has a more, idk, "classic" ring to it.
Now, you can argue whether we have an "envious loser" problem or not, and how big their influence is, and if it's too late to do anything at all, or all is lost already.
A vocal minority is visibly complaining about another vocal minority visibly complaining. Thank god we have social media that enabled this in the first place.
This feels a lot like people during the civil rights movement complaining about "a loud minority complaining, and another minority complaining about that". Not everything is equivalent.
Vocal minority is complaining about another vocal minority targeting them, including violently. It is also complaining about other vocal minority trying to make their art and fun illegal (drag).
Yes, they have. And they have the right to exist and try to live their lives, just like other mentally ill people. But theres a reason societies don't celebrate deviance, and it's because you create social contagion and severely damage people and your society.
They did not propose mutilating surgeries to people throughout history. Also trans people existing does not mean there can't be a mass hysteria of kids being told to transition on shoddy scientific evidence.
They did not propose surgeries because no way of doing so were available until relatively recently.
And your claim of a hysteria of kids being told to transition closely mirrors the claim of kids being pressured into satanic rituals and similar. It's similarly fear driven and bigoted.
Many gay people now say the trans thing is the new conversion therapy for gay people, as they try to convince a lot of them that they are actually another gender.
This is also what whistleblowers at the Tavistock clinic in the UK spoke of, and is part of the reason why the UK's and other countries' health authorities are putting a halt to the affirmation model for children who are questioning gender identity.
The lack of good surgery options does not mean they don't help. If anything the fact that regret rates for transition is well below the regret rates for other cosmetic surgery should be a strong indication that if you actually care about patient wellbeing, it's the other kinds of cosmetic surgery you ought to be focusing on.
Citations? If you look into the actual studies, the picture may not be so clear cut. For example a lot if results actually only taje older people into account (who transitioned when they were older).
What analogy do you see to the satanic cult thing? Children were told they had been abused, and many caregivers were being sentenced. Who is being told what in the trans hype? Children are falsely being told they are not trans? Then they falsely believe they are not trans and accuse their doctors? Or how does the analogy work?
Meanwhile, finding actual studies of regret of cosmetic surgery is much harder, because nobody cares or want to stop people from getting boob jobs unless they're trans. So we're stuck with poor quality surveys like this one [1] claiming 65% regret, this one done for a group with a profit motive [2] claiming 65% regret.
For reconstruction after breast cancer, it's not "so bad", with this actual study [3] finding "only" ca 20% moderate to strong regret for even reconstruction, and another ~28% expressing mild regret.
Even for non-cosmetic surgery, such as e.g. hip replacements etc., it's hard to find regret rates as low as for sex reassignment.
The first study is a survey of surgeons, which seems rather useless. What warrants the assumptions that they would learn about the long term outcomes of their surgeries?
The second claims to have looked into several studies, which might include ones like the first one. Would be nice to have an actually useful direct study, especially for young people.
As for cosmetic surgery, you brought that up. I don't think it is as worrying, as many of them are reversible, and they don't sterilize the recipients. Somebody regretting to get a nose job is hardly in the same category as someone regretting they cut off their penis.
So is the mass hysteria now the belief that there is a mass hysteria against trans people, or the belief that there is a mass hysteria of kids being pushed to transition?
One thing I’ve learned is that unless the option absolutely disappears, people usually won’t search for alternatives when something goes to absolute shit. They’ll just complain and accept it.
It’s more likely that roads will be widened and traffic will grow to meet that supply than it is that cars start to go away. Cars only go away when governments announce near immediate bans.
