Freedom to accumulate incredible medical debt from an accident through no fault of your own.

Freedom to be surprised by prices at restaurants because of extraneous fees/expected tips added on.

Freedom to be selected for a mystery vacation to a compound in El Salvador without due process.

Freedom (in many states) to receive a rent increase with only a short notice to decide to move or pay increased rent.

Freedom to be held liable for government administrative errors until you can definitively prove otherwise, with the freedom to voluntarily pay a lawyer an hourly rate to decode arcane caselaw.

Freedom to enjoy a spontaneous job hunt after a market downturn.

Freedom to partake in a reduced quality of life because someone sues you for arbitrary reasons over an ambiguous law where you need to pay for a lawyer to defend yourself.

Freedom to be imposed extraneous fees that you signed up for, clearly disclosed in fine print on page 18 of a Terms document you clicked “Agree” to.

Freedom to pay a third-party company/accountant to help you find the magic number the IRS already knows what to charge you.

As an American, I’m kind of not liking some of these freedoms we are granted.

I’ll add a few more freedoms.

1. Can’t walk about drinking a beer.

2. Can’t carry too much cash or it’s at risk of being confiscated.

3. Criminalization of walking. https://illinoislawreview.org/print/vol-2017-no-3/the-crimin...

4. Pretty much have to own a car in most places.

5. Thousands of polling stations closed since the Voting Rights Act was gutted.

6. Federal politics held hostage by low population states. It’s insane that North Dakota has slightly less federal power than Texas.

7. Not even the House of Representatives has proportional representation.

> 4. Pretty much have to own a car in most places.

Hey, electric scooters are not the worst ever (although I got hit by a truck while riding one and decided to get a car just because I don't like getting hit by trucks)

They aren't, but I live in a hot, humid climate where it often rains. So a scooter is not the best there. And then my workplace is right on a highway - I can take lower-speed roads to get there, but even the slowest path involves 35 MPH roads (~55 km/h), and it's longer.

Goretex...

Yeah, it’s great, but what does that have to do with my comment?

To be worn, when it rains. Even when not. There are shoes, socks, trousers, shirts, shorts, slips, sweaters, jackets, even suits made out of that, or functionally equivalent stuff. Another option would be something very light to pull over, which you carry with you at all times, crumpled or folded into a volume of maybe two matchboxes, single- or multi-use. Much cheaper than than the goretchy parts, btw.

Need faster e-scooter!

45 MPH is not the slowest ever, and actually the issue is that I was in the bike lane attempting to pass a truck and then they suddenly turned without using their signal or checking their mirror.

So actually the lesson apparently was don't attempt to pass vehicles on a scooter, more speed is bad.

Then wear a helmet, with a bright flashing blue light on top :)

free to build whatever I want on my land, as long as it follows all the rules in this really big rule book

Regarding #2 through #7: they are all true and important. I'm aware of different efforts over the years to address some of them, but they are all definitely active problems.

Regarding #1-- is it possible you have a drinking problem?

It’s possible I’m an alcoholic but equally possible I’m so used to puritanical rules that I assume one is an alcoholic because they wish to imbibe in a park on a nice day.

> Regarding #1-- is it possible you have a drinking problem?

You don't have to be an alcoholic (I don't even drink) to agree that with OP that #1 is an arbitrary reduction of freedom. Especially when walking around with a gun is totally fine. Which one has a larger potential of killing somebody?

(And before you make some other ridiculous insinuation, we're talking here about walking, not driving.)

Walking around with a gun while being 'under the influence' is bad!1!!

you buy a coca cola and walk 50 feet from one venue to the next and nobody bats an eye, but you do that with a twisted tea and suddenly people are asking you if you suffer from alcoholism

Or cigarettes/weed, for instance.

The OP was talking the "leader of the free world"

You are talking about America

That's two very different things

Leader of the free world almost always refers to the U.S. President or the U.S. itself depending on context.

The joke/point/suggestion the person you're replying to is making, is that the US has lost that title.

Ah. That went over my head. As the leader of the free world we must remain vigilant while others get to joke around.

Really feel like point number two weakens your overall point here

That businesses are allowed to surprise you with unexpected fees is a negative thing. How can you interpret it otherwise?

Don't you just go out to eat knowing the price is going to be 20% higher after tip? I can understand the desire for predictability, but menu prices are artificially low as they don't account for labor. If tipping were 'abolished' food service prices would have to rise 10-20% across the board to compensate.

That would be fairer and more honest

I'm not talking about tips. You already get random super fine print 10-20% "service" surcharges on your bill at many restaurants. This is not the tip.

It’s just kind of silly to say “we have a tipping culture” in the same argument as “we just illegally deported a guy to El Salvador”

Come for the menial and absurd, stay for the flagrant anti-constitutional (in spirit) issues.

Service charge is a weird thing. Normally, I'd expect a volume discount if I create bigger business for someone. Restaurants decided that's not how it works.

If someone with experience could explain why 1x6 people should be charged a higher price than 6x1 people, I am curious.

Big tables are way more work for back of house as they bottleneck the kitchen with a bunch of simultaneous tickets. A large table demands more attention, but then you also end up with a larger bill on which customers are then less to add a tip. They can also decrease margin on shared plates.

As someone from totalitarian regime, I can say you clearly don't appreciate freedoms that you have.

There is not a binary choice between America or a totalitarian regime.

As an American, I recognize there are systems that can make us less free and I want to call them out in hopes that we will eventually address these issues so we have a more free society.

Various countries have laws to prevent at least some subset of the issues I’ve raised.

For now.

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/trump-deporting-us-cit...

Being from Germany our history classes in school went into great depth about the countries past - and I can't help but feel increasingly scared and left utterly speechless by all the parallels I'm seeing unfolding in the US ...

I too am similarly speechless. Living through this and seeing people essentially worship a sexually depraved, lying, con artist makes me understand how vulnerable societies are to propaganda.

We get to choose between allowing government agents to go through our files or losing our expensive hardware.

This is a lot better than the choice between allowing them to go through our files or not entering the country, but it's still pretty gross.

dizhn is free, for example, to lick as many boots as he desires. No one can take that away.

How do you figure that?