But those are vastly more flexible. You can pick which clothes to buy from which store/vendor, you can buy second hand, you can get clothes donated. You can buy cheap filling food, in bulk, get by on rice and potatoes, etc.
You can't get get a second hand operation or medicine.
They are more flexible because they are less regulated. Restaurants don't have a certificate of need to stop competitors from showing up. You can buy food internationally and have it shipped in if you can't find it locally for a reasonable price, but try to do the same with medication and you'll have a bad time.
You can even look at less regulated medication, like pet meds, and see how much cheaper some are. We don't need to go that far, just like how people food is more regulated than pet food, but without being as regulated as our current market for healthcare.
They don't need to be as highly regulated as medicine needs to be. Even children can learn most of the important elements of food safety (cook to a certain temperature, don't cross contaminate utensils, wash your hands, etc.).
Much of medicine is vastly more complex than something like food safety or clothing safety.
The funny thing is in Australia, pet medication always generates sticker shock because it's a lot more expensive for the consumer then PBS subsidized pharmaceuticals.
> They are more flexible because they are less regulated
No, because when your tooth hurts now, or you're bleeding now, or you need to get vaccinated to avoid you getting hepatitis, there's very little choice in the matter.
Healthcare is a fundamentally inelastic good. A dangerous one too, because bad quality healthcare can literally kill people. Inaccessibility of healthcare kills people too.
Look, there is no need to reinvent the wheel here. The US can look into any other developed country on the planet for inspiration. Every single one of them has a better, more accessible, cheaper for everyone involved, usually more or at least differently regulated, with better outcomes, model.
> No Way to Prevent This,' Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens
There’s a lot to say about the structure of health care, but the classic “Now” lecture isn’t it. Most people make key decisions about provisioning and paying for their health insurance months before they actually need it, and likewise establish relationships with a primary care physician or dentist at a quite ordinary level of urgency.
The vaccines are also a particular bad example. (The typical Now-lecture example is of emergency room care).
The feeling we have about changing food prices comes from price sensitivity, not some kind of food cartel secretly jacking up the price of grapes. You can choose to get the cheap grapes or buy bananas instead. There’s no menu to pick the cheap hip replacement from.
Correct. The industries with shortages (housing, healthcare, education) are ALSO the ones with Soviet-tier central planning. Honestly, we shouldn’t be surprised!
Interesting they don’t protest at the factory of VW, or BMW, or Mercedes, or Porsche. Maybe it’s not actually the “environment” they’re protesting for.
It's also interesting how they protested against nuclear for many decades but not against coal or gas, especially the one coming from Russia.
It's as if they're fueled by ideology and not reality.
Edit: yes I know they also protested against coal mining last year with that wizard, but had they kept and invested in nuclear they wouldn't have needed to revert to coal
There were protests against the coal industry, but on the mining side.
The first that I found was in 2008 against mining of brown coal[1].
I would argue that there are less targeted protest against coal because protest concerning climate change include being against using fossil fuels which includes brown coal.
Nuclear is a special case, as accidents have a higher risk with a bigger area affected, so there will be more people that are concerned about it(same as with having coal mined next door vs. having a power plant somewhere in your region).
Yes, because communism (what else is “banning private equity”?) NEVER results in “enshitification” of ANY kind.
Seriously, the issue here can most likely be tracked to private equity taking advantage of existing regulations. Not sure why MORE state involvement in the economy would be the solution.
And it sounds like you’re a communist, unless how you can explain how you can ban “investment partnerships buying companies” without doing away with private ownership more broadly?
The issue people have isn’t with “private equity”. If it was a publicly traded company doing this people would be equally upset.
There is a very negative behavior right now by companies that call themselves private equity to buy up your local vet, doctors office, etc. Then they fire staff, reduce services, and increase costs.
We the people are losing, even if some of our 401ks grow because those funds invested in these PE vehicles.
This practice imho should be banned. How? I don’t know. But the U.S. will become shittier and shittier because of it.
It doesn’t fix anything. Rents in major cities like Shanghai or Shenzhen are proportionally pricier than even the priciest American metros. All these ghost houses are in places no one wants to live. On the same note, rent is pretty damn cheap in Toledo, Ohio.
>All these ghost houses are in places no one wants to live
Most of vacant units / under occupied development areas are where people fine with living, even speculative RE purchases has to factor in location to maximize returns. Hence empty units largely located just outside of ring roads of "city" where many people live, but rent between "decent" area and "prime" urban area is huge = many owners speculating on equity growth don't even bother to rent since ROI of rentals in these areas are very bad.
No, it’s not a good point. It could be 10^100000000 flops and it wouldn’t fucking matter. There’s no evidence that would do anything at all. “AGI” may not even be possible with those flops. You’re talking about what would require unprecedented control over computing to ease fears over a scary robot fanfic. None of the “safety” concerns are real. A GPT4 open source would do nothing but hurt Sam Altman’s bottom line - YOU ARE BEING DUPED.
