> This is a massive oversimplification -- if everyone voted purely to protect their financial interests, "voter-approved tax increases" wouldn't exist.
Yes, it would! People always vote to raise taxes on the minority (the 'rich') to give money to the majority (the 'poor'). This is rule by tyranny, a common issue with democratic governments. It is one of the main reasons democracy is not the ultimate value of the United States governmental system.
Many people see it as "Oh I was paying $500 a month on healthcare but now the government will pay for it by increasing taxes. However, I'm not a 1% so it won't affect me as much as it affects them so I'm getting a dollar's worth of government for 80 cents today." Those same people aren't paying attention to their tax withholdings all they know is that if they don't get a refund then they are upset.
There will always be a large number of Americans that don't want to pay for other's poor habits. With car insurance people with fewer accidents or tickets get discounts but you can't do that in healthcare because of pre-existing conditions.
I propose a 2 part system. One system is government funded and pays for ambulances, ER visits, annual checkups/physicals, and maybe a few other basic services like dental cleaning. When you dial 911, the police and fire department both come for free, so why does the ambulance bill you a grand? Any sort of life or death situation would be covered by this. Abuse of the system can be monitored and the government has plenty of recourse.
The 2nd part of the system would cover short and long-term illnesses and conditions as well as prescriptions. Things like orthodontics could also be a part of it. Basically, it pays for any doctor that doesn't work in an ER. This way people who don't use these services a lot aren't burdened by those that do while at the same time eliminating the fear (and litigation) that comes with being bankrupted by a catastrophic accident
The analogy to car insurance comes up over and over, but I think it's flawed.
Pre-existing conditions are not defined by the average paid out in claims to a person.
It's normal to have a deductible that's over $5K and is not met in a typical year, and one or more pre-existing conditions. So it bewilders me how people keep debating as though the contrary were typical.
The question is not whether a person should have their predictable costs paid for through "insurance", but whether a person should be able to get insurance for catastrophic costs, if they are considered to have a non-quantifiable risk.
There is a fundamental inefficiency in a market that discriminates against sick people, not just a lack of "social justice" or whatever. If insurance companies are allowed to discriminate against pre-existing conditions, then they have to charge not just enough to cover the true risk of the high risk customers, but enough to cover the risk of being wrong about the risk - insurance against "unknown unknowns", adverse selection.
The problem is that there is a big difference in the effect Uber/Lyft had on places with functioning cab systems (New York, San Francisco, Chicago, DC--where Uber/Lyft should have gotten squashed by law) and those places where there wasn't (Los Angeles, San Diego, Las Vegas, Pittsburgh, etc.--where ridesharing was a boon)
While I'm not a big Uber/Lyft fan, prior to them the cab companies in the non-functional cities were atrocious.
I spent 40 minutes getting a bloody taxi at my lawyer's office in Las Vegas--and then had to wonder if I could get one back from the restaurant I went to. Getting from Monroeville to the Pittsburgh airport was a disaster. I can go on and on.
With Uber/Lyft in existence, a whole bunch of things don't happen with impunity anymore. Drivers can't refuse to pick you up. Drivers can't blow you off and not show up. Drivers can't refuse to take a credit card. etc.
Uber/Lyft aren't my favorite companies, but neither were the taxis.
Indeed, it is terrible that many more people can do a job now, with lower barriers to entry, and that the service is more easily available, more reliable and often cheaper. The medallion system of decreasing supply with employee drivers and a taxi regulator that did everything possible to protect drivers and frustrate consumer complaints about drivers not picking up black customers or refusing to drive people to places within the mandated service area was far superior for those who could buy medallions and rent them out to drivers, and for drivers who could refuse customers and still be able to pick up a fare.
Most estimates place wages for Uber and Lyft drivers at roughly the same as taxis after expenses are covered. And if you factor in the six (or at its peak, seven) figure cost of a medallion, it's basically impossible to claim that traditional taxi jobs are better than rideshare.
At the cost of billions in venture capital. The market is starting to correct itself now that most ridesharing companies are publicly traded profit seekers and cutting wages.
Not arguing its a bad thing that we make things more inclusive (my employer is very much into these initiatives and I fully support it and am involved in some of it!), but a lot of this growth happened in companies not exactly known for it. Netflix, Google, etc, were not paragons of fairness and inclusivity when they made it big.
Putting supply chain in a single location reduces cost.
Most of it had little to do with China but decisions made by the US corporate sector.
Essentially the US Govt. cannibalized it's middle class to feed the electronic, military and
finance sector.
It's hard to deal with voters and labour unions, its much easier to deal with authoritarian regimes when you are a multinational.
Yanis V. has documented this dynamic of globalization quite well in his books.
> Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia and India are becoming satellite hubs of manufacturing in Asia.
Why do you think US multi. nationals avoid India ? Given it's a parliamentary democracy and has a large english speaking population ? Why did they set up shops in China ?
In India you can have labour strike of 31 million people !
A 2 dollar / day earning India voter has more power over its government than a 30 dollar / day earning Chinese citizen.
They will move to Vietnam, Indonesia and Thailand and continue their exploitation there but
will avoid India. This just shows how misinformed you are about Asia.
The key change in Asia has been China, who are setting up technology companies in other parts of Asia, including India ( often US stolen IP being shared ).
The main goal here is to get rid of the importance of dollar / yen swap lines. It has caused a lot of problems for trade between Asian countries.
I was careful with my phrasing to indicate that but perhaps missed the main thought -- Perhaps a visual tool isn't the most effective nor pleasurable one for a severely visually impaired individual. Not because of any "burden" they create on others (e.g. using tabs which isn't a real burden at all) or an elitist attitude (e.g. they shouldn't code), but because of the burden I imagine sight is to them.
I wear glasses over my contacts simultaneously to work at a screen effectively -- I've been told by my optomotrists that work at the screen will continue to make my vision worse, but evidently I'm not too familiar with the correct terminology for my own impairments nor for others (and whether they always worsen). A fundamental misunderstanding on my part.
> There's massive cultural, ethnic, and economic diversity. The continent spans countries which are middle income to the lowest in the world. Unity and cohesiveness are difficult regionally, less across the entire continent.
You could replace Africa with India / EU / China / US the same properties exist.
Who created the borders of African countries ?
Most African if asked the question.
"Are you African ?" would answer yes.
So please give African some credit ?
> Manufacturing, traditionally the ladder that countries climb to prosperity is being automated at an unprecedented rate.
Hold your smartphone right there. Most of this narrative is driven by media in the West to placate their population, so that they dont form labour union.
Travel anywhere in the world with the labour part of the supply chain. Most manufacturing still requires 100s of million of workers. You just cant see it in the West due to ships bringing it to them.
Humans are cheap - much more than robots. You can keep humans alive in the developing world for 100 dollars / months (its not starving wage for them ). For 100 dollars / month you are getting the most advanced robot any company can build.
Total factor productivity has been declining for a while, regardless of how much automation you bring to the table you cannot solve for human entropy ( death catches up with everyone eventually, even the most advanced human roboticist dies eventually or has to retire ).
My kids still need a lot of manual human labor to be educated ( services ).
You still need a lot of manual labor to create roads, bridges and apartments.
People were talking about flying cars 50 years ago, all those flying car investors must be billionares ?
On the ground things haven't progressed much, regardless of how much you would like to believe it.
Cape Town literally ran out of water !
If you mean automation for producing cheap plastic toys for Westerns ? If I was African why should I care about being exploited for white skinned consumers ?
China pulled a fast one, with selling cheap plastic goods to move up the value chain, steal technology and create Huawei.
African countries should do the same. If the US/EU imposes tariffs due to to currency devaluation. Africans should band together and only sell their natural resources in a new currency. Lets see how long the EU/US lasts when the most resource rich continent pulls a King Faisal.
It's sounds outrageous to ears that value individualism and "independence" over community and family ties. Money is typically an enabler for independence in such societies, so a millionaire who doesn't use their money to acquire "independence" from their mom seems like an oddity.
Money is always decoupled from value ( Warren Buffet paraphrased ).
Sometimes people who add negative value like the oil men in the Permian basin get paid 100x then your pip developer.
Screw that, large amount of the surplus generated by technology companies ends up in the hand of land owners instead of stockholders ! let alone the engineers building it - who might be riding on the work of open source volunteers. Its turtle all the way down.
If you are a volunteer, you are forgoing payment and are subjecting yourself to exploitation by others by definition.
Unless you have a mechanism for enforcement you are shit out of luck.
Isn't this the point of "copyleft"? Create a valuable product, require that when someone builds on it, that what they create also be free to use.
Open source software fails like this even if it's valuable because fixes and improvements don't necessarily make it out into the open, whereas Free/libre software, if it's valuable, gets stronger over time because fixes and improvements must be available to everyone.
Adding "fixes and improvements" to software haphazardly does not, in general, make it stronger. Quite often it can be the opposite.
Software projects need someone to maintain its course, make sure changes match the purpose of the software, and most importantly, reject changes that create a burden on the project.
The point of copyleft is more ideological; it prevents others from using your software to restrict user freedoms, thereby limiting the spread of harmful, nonfree software. Copyleft is primarily intended to protect users.
I am not sure why this is not talked about often enough.
Prior to the 1980s, Japan's economy functioned as a sort of War economy. Companies would spend and invest to gain market share at the cost of margins. share prices were rarely something a company worried about, it was always about product.
This was key to Japan's insane post WW2 success.
Then came the 80s, with it US style shareholder capitalism. and within 10 years Japan's economy collapsed - never to recover.
If you notice, China is following the same exact pattern, running a War economy with a razor focus on market share over profitability. It's what causes great fortunes to be made and lost in China.
Coming back to Boeing, because of the monopolist dynamic here, nothing is going to change. Especially since the people who died were mostly foreign nationals. I doubt even if some unfortunate event like that happens in the EU,NA Boeing would go bankrupt - there would be a lot of noise for a few years, maybe some board members get fired. Too many pension plans and retirement plans depend on Boeing's survival.
One might argue that the US, as a matter of national security, should forcibly fix Boeing. In my mind, the US’s major defense suppliers are too consolidated and too dysfunctional to adequately support the military.
Arguable the US should develop more in-house capabilities (as in government employees producing their own technologies) to compete with Boeing, etc if for no other reason.
Or not by things unless there are two viable independent sources for them, forcing the companies to co-operate but not merge, since if you merge no longer two sources, if you don't co-operate no longer two sources.
I don't think anyone wants Boeing itself to go bankrupt. We want the execs who established this culture to go to jail, and to be replaced with new ones who are now strongly incentivized to do things differently.
> I don't think anyone wants Boeing itself to go bankrupt
I do. Going bankrupt means the shareholders who benefited from this lose their shirt, the company goes into Chapter 11, and the market learns that airplane companies exist to make airplanes that don't fall out of the sky.
Both of you are proposing an emotionally charged witch hunt.
As one of the top comments stated, embracing a punitive culture toward engineering accidents has no long-term benefits. In my work (and this is probably true in any successful organization) even the most severe screw up is examined honestly and without emotion so that it can be prevented from happening again. If the immediate response is to fire a bunch of people or throw them in jail, people are going to do everything they can to avoid responsibility and ultimately fixing the problem.
If in the course of an investigation it comes out that Boeing execs were willfully negligent or malicious, then we can start discussing throwing people in jail and bankrupting companies, but that shouldn't be the first reflexive impulse.
I don't follow. You're implying "US style shareholder capitalism" is poison to other cultures that try to adopt it, but why then do you think it has worked in the US?
There's clearly something unique about the US in that nearly half of the capital in the global stock market is US companies, and the gigantic, relatively young, public companies are very disproportionately American (FAANG, etc.) Is it obvious to you what it is, because I've never heard a convincing, succinct explanation.
Here's a illustration of how skewed the world stock markets are by country:
After living and working in multiple countries around the world: in the USA its easy to make money. In much of Asia there is a huge amount of corruption, and in the EU a huge amount of needless tax and regulation, and in neither areas (apart from a few Anglo countries) is English spoken as the official language.
In the EU companies spend a lot more time optimising their tax situations (for the founder and employees) and cannot easily hire or sell products across borders due to language barriers. The EU needs to adopt English officially and individual EU countries need to adopt English as an additional official language and allow children to be instructed in it
It's a principal as old as Life itself.