By that logic all food production and distribution should not be privatized because is should be for the public good rather then the profit of the few.
There are are arguments to be made about private or public but that logic makes no sense.
Some system that have many private aspects outperform other public systems and the other way around. And even in a public system many people will profit as many of the companies that are your suppliers are still for profit.
> By that logic all food production and distribution should not be privatized because is should be for the public good rather then the profit of the few.
Sounds like good logic to me, at least for essentials!
You don’t have to read very far into each of these to see that the historical conditions in each are very different to any first-world country right now.
You don't seem to understand the cause and effect here. Adopting collectivist economic central planning would be an effective way to turn prosperous first-world countries into third-world shitholes.
None of the countries you’ve cited were prosperous first-world countries before the events described. And I didn’t necessarily advocate for central planning in the same way that Stalin or Mao directed it. I don’t pretend to be an expert in such things, but fundamentally I think we can do a lot better than how we organise things now, and that profit for natural monopolies is stupid. If you think that naturally entails famine, I think you have a sad lack of hope and imagination.
If you want to make the argument that anything that is essential should be publicly owned you can make that argument. But I would suggest if you want to make that argument 'nobody should make profit' shouldn't be the relevant argument. The argument should be 'this is how we can solve X problem efficiently'.
Universal healthcare solves the problem. The US is #1 in science and tech, but spends the most with worse outcomes in general healthcare than other peer countries by far.
But it doesn't solve the problem. Does it sound like the nationalized healthcare in Australia is going well? How about Canada? The NHS in Great Britain?
Those countries DO have better healthcare outcomes than the US. You are so ignorant.
The US is #1 in developed countries for infant and maternal mortality.
Americans die from preventable and treatable causes at much higher rates than residents of peer countries, alongside a life expectancy of 79, or two to four years lower than the average for OECD countries.
We spend 18% of our GDP on healthcare, NEARLY DOUBLE the average of other peer countries.
The number one cause of bankruptcy is medical debt.
When will the American people wake up and realize their private healthcare model only benefits the rich that are able to afford the care.
You can cherry pick particular metrics to make the US healthcare system work better or worse than other countries. The US does badly on infant and maternal issues, but that's largely caused by social and lifestyle problems unrelated to healthcare. On the other hand we're at or near the top in 5-year survival rates for most forms of cancer.
Medical debt is not the number one cause of bankruptcy so you're simply wrong there. Most consumers who file for bankruptcy have some medical debt but the most common cause is a sudden loss of income (like losing their job). When consumers don't have enough cash to make ends meet they prioritize paying for food, housing, and transportation, and stop paying medical bills. Thus the medical debts tend to accumulate but this didn't really cause the bankruptcy.
I do support measures to reduce healthcare costs and improve access for patients but let's be clear about what's actually happening.
>The US is #1 in developed countries for infant mortality.
This is only because the United States is unique in its huge amount of preterm babies, which some other developed countries do not even count within their infant mortality statistics. If we had the same average infant gestation length as Sweden, we would be tied for fourth best with France and Portugal, which considering how obese we are is pretty impressive. If we had that and adopted more restrictive reporting categories like Poland or the Netherlands, we could very well be reporting as the lowest.
Its amazing to me how Americans (and others) act as if there are only 2 things in the world the US (private) system and public system that apparently everybody else on the planet has.
The US system is neither fully private nor are those other systems fully public. Its a false binary people use so they don't have to actually engage in the details of how different systems operate.
Nobody is arguing that the US has a good or 'the right' system. And nobody should argue that the British NHS (or systems like it) is some amazing magical place that gets everything right.
> When will the American people wake up and realize their private healthcare model only benefits the rich that are able to afford the care.
And yet one of the countries wit the lowest spending % of GDP on healthcare with very good outcomes has a system that has a lot of private aspects.
It's a technically both a private and public healthcare. But let's make this clear, it is dominated by private health insurance. The vast majority of people are privately insured through their job. The public insurance in America is not consistent, reliable, or good.
The US is #3 in the world for it spending on healthcare as a percentage of it's GDP, actually 16.69% in 2023, right behind Tuvalu and Nauru.
Maybe do some research before you state absurdly wrong things
Not vast. About 55% (workers and the family members) are covered by employer-sponsored health insurance. And that mostly self-selects for the younger and healthier so the coverage is less for random person.
Most retired people are not covered, and ironically very often the sick are not covered.
Okay: it’s obviously inefficient for some people to collect profit on essential services where competition is meaningless. That money should be going to improving the service for all, or paying the workers better, or ideally both. It would be more efficient to collectively organise food, shelter, healthcare, and other natural monopolies. Market competition can be for non-essentials where some inefficiency is acceptable.
No its not 'obviously inefficient'. And just asserting competition is 'meaningless' isn't actually an argument.
Neither food, nor shelter, nor healthcare are natural monopolies. As evidence by the fact that non of them are remotely monopolistic in places where there are no restrictions. Monopolies in these sectors are created and enforced by the state. Unless you are using a completely different definition from all economists.
Ironically major shops sell stables such as rice below price or at basically 0 margin, just to get people into the store where they might buy something of higher margin.
No. The issue is that there is an almost unlimited demand for healthcare.
That is true regardless of capitalism or marxism or whateverism you believe is the right answer.
Avoiding talking about money: it is easy to see the underlying issue of how should we balance a doctor's lifetime versus patients' needs versus the businesses that ultimately pay tax for it all.
We have public healthcare in New Zealand (a huge percentage of our economy is run by our government - almost socialist). Here we restrict healthcare by waitlists, beaurocracy, and other tricks. It mostly works, but the nurses that I know give too much, and are flaming out.
Meanwhile I've done the dirty boring capitalist work of bringing in overseas income to pay for our beautiful services, and I've reached my personal limit of balancing working harder versus gaining extra income (for myself and my government). I'm taxed at a demotivating rate. There's fuck all respect for being the guy bringing in the bacon to the country. I get to look forward to being treated like a boomer in a few years.
I love kumbayaa political beliefs, but not when I'm the donkey.
You’re talking at cross purposes here, there’s nothing “kumbaya” about what I’m saying. We all have to work hard for the stuff in this world and that would be the case whatever the economic system, for the foreseeable future. I just don’t want the result of that hard work to be hoarded by the bosses, that’s all.
The point is that I'm in a country that is closer to what you said you wanted (compared against the USA).
The vast majority of healthcare here is not profit oriented but instead is run by the NZ govt.
The purpose of most business is money, and few people would choose to be a boss without the financial winnings. I had the opportunity to roll the dice with everything: because fortunately I'm in a country that still has a backstop.
However the boss payout result is quite simply not worth the risk; because the median return for a startup is $0. Remaining an employee would have been a more sensible decision.
Other people like you complain, and I accept that is part of the deal I chose.
I am smart enough to have had the choice of alternative lifestyle paths like teaching or being an artist.
Meanwhile, I'm literally the guy paying for our social welfare and health system because I'm an export earner. Obviously the NZ economy deserves its return on its investment in me and our business environment.
But if you want to imply someone is greedy, then look at yourself or at your government.
There wouldn’t be half the complaints if we didn’t see the wealth disparity that we do, or the horror that is the US healthcare system. If you are running a respectable business that pays your employees fairly, has as good working conditions as you can, isn’t profiting from some fully privatised necessity, and pays its taxes, while it may not be my idea of utopia, you’re not the target of my ire.
I sometimes wonder whether capitalism is an emergent property? Or perhaps it is a dominant strategy. I visited Shenzhen and it was chokka full of entrepreneurs - I'm yet to structure my ideas around that.
Then I read about those weird papers that use basic trading strategies that result in power-law wealth distributions.
I always wonder when people complain about those that have more than them, because I seldom see them reflect upon themselves to see how much more they have than those below them. This especially applies to anyone living in the USA since everybody is relatively wealthy there, compared against most in the world. Too often I see the 1% complain about the 1%.
All healthcare systems I am aware of are horrors. Compare the US to the UK. We all struggle to understand the driving forces.
One underlying issue is that few people are proactive about the factors they control. Too many people are reckless with their health, and we all are great at excuses and casting blame elsewhere (and there can be evil that deserves some blame).
I'm fortunate enough that I know to chase intangibles.
Too many people let money dominate their worldview.
I'm also incredibly lucky to be born in New Zealand, where plenty of people also want good intangibles. And I see fewer in my circle here fight to get money/power/status.
I thought I disliked philosophy, but perhaps I like it ;)
The government already subsidizes private overproduction on US farmland.
USAID was, at its heart, a farm subsidy.
And it should be said that most 'small' farmers in the US are millionaire scions and shouldn't need subsidies to make a profit in most parts of the US (we have abundant natural resources).
More than half of all calories produced in the US are not even for human consumption. And globally enough calories to feed every human on earth are lost to inefficiency each year.
We can all benefit from a better system of distribution and production without getting lost in the magical thinking of a public/private false dichotomy.
Subsidies account for a very small % of either production or consumption of food.
Not sure why you are making an argument about food subsidizes to me, I have not argued in favor of them.
> More than half of all calories produced in the US are not even for human consumption.
Most of those go threw animals and are then consumed by humans. There is a lost factor there but saying its not for human consumption misses the point I would say. For Chicken, Pork and fish the lost factor is pretty small.
I mean the US gives enormous subsidies to farmers for food production, and Walmart receives somewhere around $27 billion a year in SNAP from customers. So in that sense, both of these are essentially public to some degree
The subsidies are not 'enormous' vs the total value of all food consumption or production.
There is a huge difference also between subsidizing demand with private supply and providing supply. Exactly the debate that is relevant in healthcare as well. A system can do both, or neither or a combination of the two.
Food is, in general, very accessible, cheap, and elastic (People's food decisions are easily changed depending on the price).
Healthcare in America is not accessible, extremely expensive, and inelastic.
We have not had a famine in the developed world in quite a long time, but the healthcare crises continues.
The fact remains clear: The number one cause of bankruptcy is medical debt.
Healthcare is the only service that is life and death, where the money paid by the patient is completely inelastic.
I'm not saying doctors shouldn't be paid well. But what is really clear is that while the rich pay for premium concierge VIP treatment, the poor are regularly turned away for treatment they can't afford. You health insurance here is tied to your job. Lose your job? Pay $2000/month for COBRA or you don't deserve to have healthcare.
Don't act like public healthcare, expanding access to primary care physicians, and reducing medical administrative bloat is some economic degeneration headed for the sickle and hammer. I'm tired of pretending Ayn Rand style libertarianism capitalism is the perfect solution that has worked for everything including healthcare.
> Healthcare in America is not accessible, extremely expensive, and inelastic.
Did I somehow make the argument that the US has a good health care system? I must have missed that.
> Healthcare is the only service that is life and death, where the money paid by the patient is completely inelastic.
Most healthcare spending isn't actually 'life and death' either. And even if it in the medium term is 'life and death' only a very small amount of health care is an emergency where you can not potentially consider different options.
Just as most time when you are going to the store its not 'life and death'. But still if don't do anything eventually you will starve.
> The fact remains clear: The number one cause of bankruptcy is medical debt.
My goal would be to achieve the best overall healthcare outcomes at reasonable cost. That's at least the first stab at a definition, I'm sure we could come up with a better criteria.
If you increase payroll taxes as much as a fully public system would required, you would just have more people default on their houses and cars instead. Because there is no world, no matter how many billionaires you disown, that you can implement a universal system without massive increases of income taxes.
Again I'm not even arguing that a universal system is bad or wrong thing to aim for. The argument that I actually made was that 'some people make profit' isn't actually a good argument against any system.
> Don't act like public healthcare, expanding access to primary care physicians, and reducing medical administrative bloat is some economic degeneration headed for the sickle and hammer. I'm tired of pretending Ayn Rand style libertarianism capitalism is the perfect solution that has worked for everything including healthcare.
You are literally just ranting about shit I have never argued. I guess I must have trigger something.
Not exactly. The Australian system is mixed public/private and many physicians work at for-profit organizations. While Australia does have some level of universal coverage it's a two-tier system where people who can afford it pay for private insurance to obtain better care.
IMO in that case its their own fault. After all they have free will and can use it against their own good if they so choose. Let them get pwned a few times and see if they learn.
that's so dumb on so many levels... should we strip cars from active safety measures and let drivers who are not super good at driving just kill themselves on the road?
I agree, but what I disagree with is the idea that everyone must be prevented from freely installing software on their own devices to make sure unskilled people cannot be tricked into doing it.
I don't really understand why a well designed sandbox and permissions system doesn't solve the problem.
Well cars kill people, granny using the password “password” does not. We can’t prevent all levels of stupidity and carelessness.
If people want to have dumb passwords and download malware, then so be it. You think they can’t do that today with the google play store? Of course they can. Most malware on android comes from the Google play store.
Parent commenter's argument wasn't that people don't know to use good passwords, instead they just don't care. I think in that case getting hacked is completely one's own fault. If we're comparing this to cars, a closer analogy would be dying in a car crash because of an unfastened seatbelt.
maybe there should be alternatives to using the smartphone for everything, personal finances included. my bank stopped offering a home banking service for example (yes, of course the mobile app still sucks), and it's a trend.
A lot of those "up to"s are expressing user options, though -- "up to" 512 GB RAM means that there are configurations that include that, but also cheaper configurations that don't. That's a pretty different beast than "up to 4.3x faster performance", which means (presumably) that exactly one benchmark showed a 4.3x improvement and the rest showed less -- which is to say, means very little.
> They're trying NOT to say it had a 1440 watt power supply.
It isn't, though. That rating is for circuit sizing. Power supplies are rated by their output power. If you assume an 89% efficiency for the power supply, and assume 1.0 PFC, and assume that it must be able to supply its rated power at the critical corner (low voltage), and assume zero margin on the current rating, then this is a 1068 W power supply. More likely its design spec is around 1000 W; it certainly can't be 1440 W.
46, actually. 46. I am pretty certain that the explanation lies completely elsewhere...
(overuse of overstatements, for the sake of manipulation, perhaps? something that makes their saying unreliable this way - e.g. they forget to mention the other end of the range, or perhaps the mean, completely .... except when it is good for them, e.g. prices ... that's borderline to lying this way...)
It would also be incorrect. "Up to" doesn't mean any possible upper bound, it describes the top of a known range. I can't say a car I'm selling goes "up to" 900mph if it tops out at 120mph.
¹ drivers are responsible to get the car into a low earth orbit themselves and need to be familiar with the orbital maneuvers needed to accelerate the car to 900mph
A silly hobby of mine has been to track Apple's use of the word "computer". They don't use it. The only use of the word that I can find, on apple.com, is in legal boilerplate.
They also don't use "appliance." Nor do their computers behave as appliances.
It's just branding - they don't want to sell you a generic "computer" - they want to sell you a Mac. It's really not all that different from a computer. Might look a little nicer[1]. Uses a custom processor. But you can write software for it like a computer. And it can display things on a monitor like a computer.
They do have wrist, pocket, and tablet versions of computers, but those might be considered more like appliances.
I am sure I'd love computer products more without the nauseating marketing bs. With dry boring technical facts only. I am repelled now, need more self drive and effort getting to the cashier, than without it.
(Scroll-oriented web pages see me running away fast. Not only Apple, which is a champion in it, but articles in general. That make me a passive spectator eating what they want me to eat, the way they want me to. Rather than a free discoverer. I hate being pushed into something. I like freedom.)
All these new rules are just lowering the skill floor for driving while also lowering the skill ceiling. If you're a capable driver you are literally punished for it by useless beeps, distracting steering wheel nudges (sometimes even yanks) and lights coming up on your sideview mirror that look like the car behind you has put on their turn signal (it is the blindspot sensor light).
Nobody seems to be asking whether you should even be behind the wheel if you can't properly drive without all these assist-features. Driving a car is after all a privilege and not a right. Car manufacturers of course want to make it the former because it means more customers and more money.
Now is the perfect time to jump ship and stop supporting these greedy blood-sucking soulless conglomerates. Game companies and brands like PlayStation, Nintendo, Activision-Blizzard and XBOX have demonstrated time and time again that they don't give a flying fuck about customer satisfaction, quality of service or such meaningless things. The only thing they care about is growing their revenue like cancer and sucking every last fraction of a penny out of customers like a dehydrated vampire. The only reason they are able to do this is because we are allowing them by voting with our wallets against our own benefit.
Luckily people have finally started to notice this and I really hope 20 years from now the previously mentioned companies, among others, have strangled themselves to death with their own greed. I just wish more people realized that they are not actually dependent on the services these companies provide and, in fact, it's quite the opposite. More people realizing this and acting accordingly would make the death of those greedy giants happen faster.
There's only one thing that gamers love as much as gaming: complaining about how greedy gaming companies are.
But that's an equal love at best. They'll still fork money over hand over fist for games and the associated revenue streams. They're addictive and are literally designed by companies to be that way.
And it goes beyond that these days, really. There's identity and community wrapped up in these online games. Some dude who's been playing WoW since the late part of the Bush administration and who has tattoos and talks daily with his clan or whatever it is literally doesn't have anything else. He's in middle age.
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