Tesla [Product] is poorly supported really shouldn't be a surprise to anyone at this point.
Their cars have build quality issues, self driving continues to be "just around the corner", their service centers are cheap, the solar roof is it's own nightmare, the pivot to robots is laughable, the robot taxis are a PR stunt that are amusing but in a cringey way...
And the promises over the years of automatic chargers, replaceable batteries, sensors, etc.
The company had a great idea early, had tons of goodwill, a growing manufacturing capacity, and squandered it chasing whatever Elon dreamt up.
I wonder about the editorial choice to use veterans rather than, say, women who have PTSD from assaults, which is a much larger group of people. (Approximately 4% of US men and 8% of US women experience PTSD every year across all reasons like accidents, sexual assaults, combat, etc.)
Presumably this treatment would help everyone? Or is it somehow supporting only vets?
Way back in something like 2002, I was in college. One day at my then-girlfriend’s apartment east of campus, she got a phone call. An old friend of hers was in town, so she told him to come over. I don’t know his name, but let’s call him J., which is a randomly selected letter.
J. was a traveling Ibogaine ... healer? He went from city to city, summoned by the loved ones of advanced heroin addicts, to attempt one last Hail Mary shot at recovery.
These were situations of absolute desperation, and I can’t overstate the seriousness with which he took his adopted occupation. He described to us in detail his process.
First, he interviewed the person requesting help, seeing what else they had tried and trying to suss out if Ibogaine would be worth the risk. He turned away most callers.
Those who he accepted would be dropped off at his van, inside which was a mobile, DIY ICU of sorts: a bed, food, water and emergency medical supplies. He would administer the ibogaine (I don’t know what form this took), and then, in his words, the patient would undergo a 2 to 3-day continuous hallucination.
During this time, in J.’s observations, the patient was almost always ‘visited’ by dead relatives, who typically admonished the patient for what had become of them, laying into them with real talk about the state of their life.
J. said half of the patients came out of this experience fundamentally changed, and effectively cured of their addiction to heroin. I don’t know if he had any data (anecdotal or otherwise) on recidivism, but the implication was that this was likely to be permanent.
But, he said, the other half went insane, which is why he spent a great deal of effort screening families and informing them of the risks.
I don’t know how much, if any, of this is true. I don’t know what ‘insane’ means, or meant. But I remember vividly how seriously this guy took it, without ever coming off as some kind of self-satisfied guru or medicine man, believing himself to be a god, or anything like that. He never accepted money. He lived somewhat roughly. I wonder whatever happened to that guy.
If this was a study on ptsd in assault survivors you could make the exact same comment asking why they didn’t try it in veterans (and I have no reason to doubt someone would)
> you could make the exact same comment asking why they didn’t try it in veterans
That would be an extremely odd comment to make, though. Not only does the category "assault survivor" obviously not exclude veterans, why would you single them out to care about?
The war machine is the one funding so the framing makes sense.
Not that I like it... I would prefer that the concept of a war veteran was non existent but that is akin to wishing the moon was made out of cheese.
The research on ptsd began with US veterans afaik. It’s probably the group that is most studied for it and also receives trials.
The US also spends a large amount of money on each veteran. If they can find a cure for trauma they would benefit hugely from it. The side effect of this is that others would benefit as well.
I mean, that does sound pretty crazy. Specific wars are often ill-advised or largely pointless, but "stop doing war" presupposes that all other countries in the world will also "stop doing war", otherwise what you're suggesting is just unilateral surrender under the guise of stopping war.
My interpretation of the parent comment is: Americans should stop aggressing other countries, slaughtering the population, and then publishing scientific breakthroughs on treating ptsd among the killers.
I'd say the comment says nothing about wars of survival, which is not what veterans have ptsd for. No one is 'doing war' at America.
Game theory and history say otherwise. If you want to be a fool, have at it. Just don't expect the rest of us to go along or respect you because of it.
> presupposes that all other countries in the world will also "stop doing war"
No it doesn't. But making efforts to stop it ourselves is necessary to achieve that. Same reason it's worth doing nuclear disarmament: because not disarming guarantees nuclear war eventually.
Stopping doing wars doesn't mean not having a military capable of wars. It means not starting them. The US hasn't been involved in justified military action since the 40s.
It's who the trials are done on. US veterans have their own health care system, so that may have played a role in why they were targeted for the research.
Presumably isn't how science is done. They did an experiment with veterans who had ptsd and ibogaine so the results are relevant to veterans with ptsd using ibogaine.
One could, presumably, extrapolate that result to an even wider audience and say "hallucinogens could help people who experience trauma" but that'd be unscientific and irresponsible to imply this study showed that.
I always associated it with treating opioid and alcohol addiction. I suspect there's something to do with funding here. Same with the whole "we could use MDMA to treat veterans" angle when veterans are a tiny percentage of the population worth treating with it.
It's political posturing, makes it more likely to get bipartisan support. Female rape victims are not as unimpeachable as the (superficially) hallowed veteran in American society.
There really isn't. From the mouth is basically the same distance and it contains teeth and a tongue. Through the rectum is much much much farther through meters of intestine. Through the skin creates a surgical hole that's going to be difficult to keep sterile.
It was either a genuine ableist comment or a ham fisted attempt at sarcasm poking fun at ableist folks.
I see now it was the former.
Edit: Pre-empting the inevitable "how is this ableist?":
I don't mind the use of a reclaimed slur, I'm a big proponent of that, tbh. I use them all the time. What's ableist is the idea that spouses have to deal with their partners. The idea the autism must be a negative in a relationship removes agency from autistic people. My spouse is not my nurse, I am not someone they have to "deal with".
I look around and see work that needs doing all the time. Potholes, park maintenance, housing shortages, pollution. As long as we're have unsatisfied needs, there's work to be done. I also see unemployment.
What kind of system has work to be done but not enough jobs... it's a world where work is not focused on satisfying our needs but rather focused on maximizing profit. As long as we're choosing to make work about making someone else wealthy rather than satisfying all our needs, we'll never have enough jobs to get the work done.
Potholes are a visible manifestation of society saying it's more efficient to prioritize capital than care.
> Potholes are a visible manifestation of society saying it's more efficient to prioritize capital than care.
How though. Roads are a public good and fixing them should come from the governments pocket. How can you say the problem is private industry, when the government is doing such a good job collecting our tax money. You should be asking where is that money going. And then you will see its because of mismanagement by the government. Trillions in debt, for what?
Potholes are a visible manifestation of society saying it's better to vote for people who vibe with you, than people who can provide essential services.
You are assuming that the obsession with maximizing profit is limited to private industry, where the post you are replying to makes no such assumption.
I agree that the government ought to work for the public good, and not doing so is mismanagement and corruption. But following the logic of the parent poster, the postulate would be that the mismatch between what the government ought to do and what it does is an outgrowth of a society that values maximizing profit over satisfying needs. Which I find hard to deny if we are a bit flexible with the question "whose profit is maximized". This is just a different way to arrive at the word corruption, but it provides a frame for possible societal causes for that widespread corruption
The way greed applies to the public purse is mediated by zero cost accounting wherein a government agency is compelled to spend all of their year's allocation without completing their work so that they can justify getting more in the next budget cycle.
The tax rates in the US are low; that's why there is so much debt and so few services.
Anti-tax groups have long followed the 'Starve the Beast' strategy (and their opponents are completely incompetent and fall for it every time):
1) Cut taxes
2) Point out the resulting deficit, say we're spending
too much, and cut services
3) Repeat
Now we're at point 2. It's not spending, it's lack of revenue. Some large corporations pay no tax. The US has cut IRS enforcement even though it pays for itself many, many times over. The wealthiest people pay a much lower tax rate because their typical form of income (capital gains) is taxed at a much lower rate than other people's (salary), and because their taxes are cut over and over and they have endless loopholes - e.g., trust funds!
Looking at the stats, the US public spending is about 40 per cent of the American GDP, which, though lower than most of the EU, is not really "low". 40 per cent of something as huge as the American economy is huge as well. Given that the US economy is a quarter of the global economy, US public spending is one tenth of the economic output of the entire mankind. That is not low.
BTW Swiss public spending is lower (32 per cent), and Swiss sidewalks and roads are uniformly nice. At the same time, Germany is at 48 per cent and it has a big problem with aging infrastructure, railways, bridges etc. Swiss rail authority regularly refuses delayed German trains at the border in order not to cause chaos in the reliable Swiss railway network. Given the 32 vs. 48 per cent of public spending, you would expect it to be the other way round, but it isn't. The mapping between the volume of public spending and quality of public services is not that simple.
Maybe the problem in the US is that too much money gets siphoned away by various legal or illegal means. Famously, whenever places like California or NYC try to build something like a new subway line or a new high-speed rail, their project budgets balloon into absolutely insane volumes, much higher than comparable projects in France, Italy or Japan, and the main reason is that various special interests need to be satisfied, from the construction unions to various NIMBYs.
With such a flawed model of public spending, higher taxes will only result in higher waste.
I appreciate the the public spending statistic, which adds a dose of reality to the discussion. At the same time, a few cherry-picked examples (Swiss and German railways) is meaningless. It's true the US spends a lot in absolute terms, but a huge economy with 340 million people has a lot of roads and other expenses.
And the US is inefficient at building some things (subways) and probably more efficient at others. Again, it's cherry picking unless we have broader data.
> With such a flawed model of public spending, higher taxes will only result in higher waste.
As I said in the GP, there is waste (inefficiency) in everyone and everything, and larger organizations unavoidably have more. The cherry-picked examples don't prove the US and every local goverment in it are somehow less efficient, but certainly there is inefficiency.
But the statement "higher taxes will only result in higher waste" is logically wrong: higher taxes (and assumed higher spending) will lead to more waste - unavoidable for anyone and any org - but also more productivity; you can't have one without the other. E.g., if 15% of every dollar is wasted then higher taxes increase both waste and output. The US does have roads, schools, healthcare, sewers, etc., and even some urban light rail, paid for by taxes. The money does produce things, and many of those things can only be accomplished with taxes.
On the basis of what your comment, the US should cut all taxes because they are all waste. That's probably not what you mean but that's what some anti-tax groups say and what they do - cut everything regardless of outcome, which is what has been done on a national level recently. The simplistic answers are dangerous and not useful.
"On the basis of what your comment, the US should cut all taxes because they are all waste."
Nope, I didn't express a conviction that this is a linear function from 0 to 100. My statement should rather read as "If, at current, the American public sector is unable to provide good roads and sidewalks while redistributing 40 per cent of the domestic GDP, I find it hard to believe that the situation would improve much if it redistributed 45 per cent instead."
Good roads and sidewalks aren't that expensive. The Romans and the Incas could maintain them with a more primitive economy, and a well-run modern city should have no old potholes anywhere.
Many years ago a US friend told me that the way to tell the true state of a nation's finances is to look at its infrastructure, because when money is tight that's the first thing that gets cut. Don't look at the imaginary numbers in the stock market, look at the roads, sidewalks, bridges, railway lines.
I was kinda shocked, when working in South Africa, to find that the roads and sidewalks there were often in much better shape than ones I'd seen in the US. And from the other side, the only place I've ever seen roads as patched and potholed as ones in US cities was in rural Russia.
> The wealthiest people pay a much lower tax rate because their typical form of income (capital gains) is taxed at a much lower rate than other people's (salary)...
A different way to think about this would be to say that a lower tax rate for capital gains is a trick (incentive) to get the wealthiest people to invest their wealth in the market, which provides capital for people trying to grow the economy and provide jobs, rather than spend their wealth on luxuries for themselves. In this way, we have an economy focused more on the needs and wants of regular people, and less on producing what wealthy people want.
Low capital gains tax incentivizes investment and venture capital, so the rich can grow their wealth faster than the poor, while creating a job market. Compare that to spending wealth on luxuries, a money sink that also creates a job market and grows the economy (people have to make the luxuries). The former creates more liquid assets (stock) with no clear connection towards meeting the needs of regular people. The latter creates more solid assets with no clear connection towards meeting the needs of regular people.
I vaguely remember Adam Smith talking about directing the vanity of the rich towards spending great amounts of money on proper objects in exchange for recognition. 4:00 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejJRhn53X2M
> Low capital gains tax incentivizes investment and venture capital, so the rich can grow their wealth faster than the poor, while creating a job market.
You forgot the most important part. Let me add it for you: "Low capital gains tax incentivizes investment..., while creating a job market, [and, more importantly, providing goods and services that are beneficial to society as a whole]."
> The former creates more liquid assets (stock) with no clear connection towards meeting the needs of regular people. The latter creates more solid assets with no clear connection towards meeting the needs of regular people.
These claims are demonstrably false. Paper assets provide no tangible benefits. You cannot eat a stock certificate, nor can you use it to heal an infection, nor can you ask it to repair your refrigerator. To receive a tangible benefit such as these, you must consume a good or service. And what is the economy but a machine that produces the goods and services that the people within it consume? Therefore, it is the mix of goods and services consumed (which equals that produced) that determines how society benefits. And, as you've already admitted, a low capital gains tax incentivizes the wealthy to buy paper assets instead of luxuries for themselves. But luxuries are real goods and services, aren't they? In other words, doesn't that policy incentivize wealthy people to consume less and, therefore, claim a reduced share of economic benefits? Consequently, doesn't an increased share of economic benefits go to "regular people"?
>[and, more importantly, providing goods and services that are beneficial to society as a whole].
I think enshittification, cost externalization, and rent-seeking behavior cancel this out, muddying the connection towards meeting the needs of regular people. For example, we needed cap-and-trade to internalize the costs of acid rain back onto power plants.
>These claims are demonstrably false. Paper assets provide no tangible benefits.
I think my rhetorical bait worked: you seem to agree with incentivizing luxury spending on real goods and services (instead of incentivizing capital gains)? Adam Smith argues to take that vanity and drive it towards public recognition. For example, many universities put the names of rich donors on the opulent buildings they donate to build. That's good! (My college's music building was amazing!)
>In other words, doesn't that policy incentivize wealthy people to consume less and, therefore, claim a reduced share of economic benefits? Consequently, doesn't an increased share of economic benefits go to "regular people"?
I thought trade doesn't make a zero-sum game? Money supply is a zero-sum game (I think), and I want money sinks to spread the money. We want them to spend their stored money to generate more tangible wealth for all. Luxury goods often push the limits to what can be done, advancing technology and generating wealth while also depleting their money stores. But while investments and venture capital might also advance technology and generate wealth, they continue to concentrate the money supply to the rich. Not good!
> I think enshittification, cost externalization, and rent-seeking behavior cancel [general societal benefits] out.
While I agree that the factors you cited are drags on the economy, I think historical evidence suggests strongly that they do not cancel out net benefit to society in general. The fact that poor people today benefit from refrigeration, air conditioning, electronic computers, vaccinations, safe anesthesia, cancer drugs, dialysis, HDTVs, cell phones, and a host of other things that the wealthiest people of yesteryear could not have purchased with all their wealth, suggests that the net trend of the economy has been to produce benefits for all of society, including regular people.
> you seem to agree with incentivizing luxury spending on real goods and services (instead of incentivizing capital gains)?
No, that is the opposite of my original claim. My claim, put simply, is that a low capital gains tax shifts the economy's output away from luxuries and toward meeting the needs of regular people.
> I thought trade doesn't make a zero-sum game?
But resource allocation is a zero-sum game. In any given year, there are only so many productively employable atoms and human hours. If less of those resources are being used to produce luxuries for wealthy people, they can be employed to produce goods and services for regular people.
Very interesting perspective. Let me try and repeat it back. Resource allocation is a zero-sum game within any given year, resource production increases yearly as technology increases, technology increases more as capital increases, so a low capital gains tax will increase resource production more than a high capital gains tax.
If I got that right, here's my best shot at a contradiction. If resource allocation is a zero-sum game, money (liquid assets) determines resource allocation, and low capital gains tax further concentrates money to the wealthy (I would need to prove this, and in recent years the distribution of wealth has increased towards the wealthy), then the wealthy gain a greater share of resource allocation next year.
This might not result in problems, as historically the increases in resource production have increased regular people's resource allocation in absolute terms, but I see no necessity in this trend. I might argue that the poor can lose resource allocation in the zero-sum game, but I'd need to prove that (something like, inflation hurts poor people more than the rich? incomplete thoughts). I could also argue that currents trends place financial assets (intangible) above production assets (tangible), slowing the benefit to regular people.
I claim that if the wealthy were to put their money in luxuries (things that don't give capital gains), they would control more allocation in a given year, but then they would decrease their share of resource allocation the next year. I also claim that resource production would increase just fine, as technology initially benefiting luxury production expands toward general production.
First, thanks for continuing this interesting conversation!
> Let me try and repeat it back. Resource allocation is a zero-sum game within any given year, resource production increases yearly as technology increases, technology increases more as capital increases, so a low capital gains tax will increase resource production more than a high capital gains tax.
Actually, this line of reasoning is tangential to the thrust of my argument. Let’s get to it now:
> If I got that right, here's my best shot at a contradiction. If resource allocation is a zero-sum game, money (liquid assets) determines resource allocation, …
Okay, here’s what I think you’re missing. Money does not determine resource allocation. But spending money does! Only by spending money do you get to consume goods and services. Therefore, by getting wealthy people not to spend but to invest almost all of their wealth, we get them to give up their claim on where today’s resources are allocated. They control wealth but not resource allocations.
> … and low capital gains tax further concentrates money to the wealthy, …
I believe that this claim is more or less true.
> … then the wealthy gain a greater share of resource allocation next year.
But this claim does not follow. Wealthy people gain a greater share of the wealth allocation next year, but they do not spend that wealth, nor the new wealth they gain each year. They spend only a tiny fraction of it – and invest the rest. Thus, most of this “extra” wealth that wealthy people gain is invested, with resource allocations from that wealth to be determined by spending across the population in general, not by the wealthy who invested it.
> I claim that if the wealthy were to put their money in luxuries (things that don't give capital gains), they would control more allocation in a given year, but then they would decrease their share of resource allocation the next year. I also claim that resource production would increase just fine, as technology initially benefiting luxury production expands toward general production.
Let’s say that the wealthiest 1% of people control half of all wealth. If we forced them to spend that wealth, much of the economy’s resources would be redirected to provide goods and services to the top 1% of people. For a very long time, the remaining 99% of people, especially the lower 80%, would find it very hard to purchase goods and services, for their spending would be dwarfed. Resource production would increase, but I doubt it would be “just fine.” Factories producing mega-yachts, doctors providing exotic cosmetic surgeries, and master chefs preparing one-of-a-kind meals with luxury ingredients such as hand-massaged beef fed grasses from the richest soils on Earth… These are not easily adapted to produce things that regular people need.
By getting those wealthy people to invest their wealth instead, we get them to give up their ability to dictate where today’s resources go. In exchange, they (as a group) get the promise of earning more wealth tomorrow from their investments.
I agree, however, that concentration of wealth is a problem for society. When a small number of people can, in effect, buy the government with pocket change, that’s not good. But a low tax rate on capital gains is only one contributing factor to the concentration-of-wealth problem.
>thanks for continuing this interesting conversation!
Cheers!
>Money does not determine resource allocation. But spending money does!
Very good point. Investors have some say as to where the money goes, but you're right. Often said that the economy runs on debt.
>They spend only a tiny fraction of it – and invest the rest.
Well said. I suppose their wealth only represents a potential for resource allocation.
>If we forced them to spend that wealth, much of the economy’s resources would be redirected to provide goods and services to the top 1% of people.
Under most theories of value, this extreme demand and labor would cause the price of such luxury goods and services to skyrocket! The money would quickly distribute to the hands of those who provided such goods. Then the masses can spend the money.
I now see our discussion as a classic debate of supply-side vs demand-side economics. I'll steal "the unity of means and ends" from the anarchists for this: I fully believe that the masses must have the resource allocation potential in order to achieve greater wealth for all. That exists in a positive feedback loop with businesses, increasing technology and production, and increasing the general standard of living. But, investing gives the resource allocation power to the businesses. With enough wealth and power, large businesses can keep the investment cycle flowing between businesses and owners, underpaying the workers and buying out competitors. At the most extreme result, a vertically closed system where the workers must meet the needs of the business (company towns).
>These are not easily adapted to produce things that regular people need.
So many goods start out as expensive luxury goods. Refrigeration, commercial airlines, air conditioning, computers, HDTVs, cell phones...
>When a small number of people can, in effect, buy the government with pocket change, that’s not good.
Then they morph government policy towards further enriching themselves, hurting the masses in the process. Very bad!
Would you advocate for a 0% capital gains tax? Or a capital gains tax-break? How would you calculate the ideal number? (I would place capital gains tax included in income tax.)
> Would you advocate for a 0% capital gains tax? Or a capital gains tax-break? How would you calculate the ideal number? (I would place capital gains tax included in income tax.)
I wouldn't advocate for any particular tax rate for capital gains without it being part of comprehensive fiscal and government reform. The point I was trying to get across in my original comment was that, when people talk about raising the capital gains tax because they think it's an obvious way to tax the rich without affecting working people and that the only reason we're not already doing it is because the rich have rigged the system, the reality is way more complicated. There are no easy fixes. Changing the capital gains tax substantially (outside of more widespread reforms) is likely to have unwanted consequences. And even with widespread reforms, we're likely to suffer unwanted consequences.
I'm not taking a test (feel free to answer yourself) but my view is that it's the same old talking point: Help the wealthy, and the Nth order effects will benefit others. The only thing these policies deliver on reliably is the 1st order effect - helping the wealthy.
(I think that's a good way to analyse any policy - the 1st order effects are the ones you can count on; the Nth order effects are just BS that magically costs nothing, but gets others to go along - 'the people will pay for this stadium for my privately owned franchise (1st order) and it will bring business to the community (2nd order).' That's repeated over and over, and the 2nd order effect is well known to not happen, but it sometimes gets enough votes from those uneducated in the issue.)
I think in the 1980s the Reagan administration called it 'trickle-down economics', such an incredibly revealing name!
Okay, but you didn't refute the line of reasoning. You called it "the same old talking point" and then jumped to the conclusion that "the only thing these policies deliver on reliably is the 1st order effect - helping the wealthy." But you didn't show that your claim was true. Or that the claim you were responding to was false.
Can you offer a substantive argument that getting the wealthy to invest their wealth instead of spending it on themselves is a policy that benefits only the wealthy and makes life worse for everyone else?
If that's what you think is happening – tests and grades – when people come to a site whose purpose is to foster thoughtful and substantive discussions, and then on that site they share ideas and invite criticism of them, you might consider whether you're missing something.
I'm curious. What specifically about my comment made you believe it was a test and that I would be assigning grades to responses, as opposed to an idea for which I invited criticism?
> Can you offer a substantive argument that getting the wealthy to invest their wealth instead of spending it on themselves is a policy that benefits only the wealthy and makes life worse for everyone else?
Not gp, but if the investment is made in either a non-productive asset, or in the secondary market toi buy share in a company that is downsizing/stabilizing their investments (share buyback is very often a good tell), then the wealth does not benefit society in general but either inflate a bubble, or separate the owning class from the working class.
> Not gp, but if the investment is made in either a non-productive asset, or in the secondary market toi buy share in a company that is downsizing/stabilizing their investments..., then the wealth does not benefit society in general but either inflate a bubble, or separate the owning class from the working class.
That if is doing a lot of lifting. What percentage of investments do you believe satisfy that if condition? If that percentage is p, then do you agree that it's generally beneficial for society, for approximately 100% − p percent of the time, when wealthy people decide to invest in the economy instead of spend on themselves?
(Further, even when companies downsize, don't they release their resources, such as people and equipment, back to the market? And doesn't the evidence of economic history suggest that, on the whole, the market tends to take up resources, including those released from downsizing companies, and use them produce goods and services that benefit both the owning class and the working class? For example, for most of history, even the wealthiest of the owning class lacked electricity, air conditioning, refrigeration, radio, television, electronic computers, the internet, cell phones, HDTVs, antibiotics, vaccines, generic drugs, medical imaging, DNA testing, video conferences with health care professionals, and so on. Today, don't even working people benefit from these things? So, even when your if condition holds, the claimed consequence, that such investments "either inflate a bubble, or separate the owning class from the working class" seems hard to believe.)
More than two third of all public investments are on the secondary market, and this do not benefit investments or the 'real' economy. It's this beneficial to society at best 33% of the time (I'm counting MIC in 'benefic for society' only for the sake of the argument to be clear).
While a worker is beneficial to society 100% of the time.
In the US, the Republican party for the last 40 years has had a policy of starve the beast. They actively choose policies that provide worse services/break the governments ability to provide services/pile on unsustainable debt so that they can make the very same argument you are. Government is broken (yes, because Republicans have chosen to intentionally break it for 40 years. It is hard for a country to function when half of politics is intent on making the country worse in order to reach their political agenda).
How many of those unemployed people want to get a job filling potholes, or mowing the lawn at the park? How many are qualified to do anything about pollution in whatever specific sense you mean? What job does your average unemployed person get to "fight housing shortages" or whatever you're trying to say?
> What kind of system has work to be done but not enough jobs
Any system that isn't designed from the outside? Any system that's goal is not simply maximizing employment? Surely you can imagine a scenario with two civilizations, one has 99% employment, one has 80% employment, but the people in the 99% employed society are, on average, worse off?
> As long as we're choosing to make work about making someone else wealthy rather than satisfying all our needs
Most people would not say the number of potholes they encounter or the level of park maintenance is so poor that their needs aren't being met.
I haven't done the math, but my guess is that a pothole might do hundreds of dollars worth of damage over its lifetime, maybe thousands. If society was willing to pay 1/10th of that sum per pothole to anyone willing to fill it, there'd be a lot more applicants. (Though it might lead to people making potholes on purpose, so the payment needs to depend on road health over time, not number of potholes filled.)
Well your last sentence shows exactly why it wouldn't work and so you're not really talking about "1/10th of that sum per pothole" you're talking about, I don't even know - paying random people random sums of money at arbitrary times based on overall road health?
A map, posted on the municipal or county website. You, a private citizen, bid to fill a hole. The city accepts. You upload a geostamped 'Before' picture. You are given a time window to fill the hole (often at night). You fill the hole. Upload 'After' pictures. Get paid in the next cycle.
You take a sledge hammer to the street a block over. Repeat. Profit.
You do a bad job filling the hole. Some hits it and their car breaks. They sue you and the city. The city attorneys successfully push the blame onto you since you're a contractor. You have no liability insurance because you're not a professional because that's the whole point of this thing, right? You're on the hook for the car, a few grand for a medical check-up, and a spurious mental anguish claim. You declare bankruptcy and on the way back from your last visit with your attorney, you hit another pothole and your car breaks. Full circle.
I wonder how much of roads today being worse are because we have added a large amount of buried services under roadways? There are streets in my town that are a patched up messed. Thinking about it, all of those streets/the worst streets in town are ones without overhead lines.
Yeah, you will fill the potholes to the limit of your abilities and the society provides for your needs. This had been tried many times and does not work because the balance of abilities and needs comes out unbounded: even if your abilities to fill potholes were greater than your needs initially, having all needs satisfied generates more needs and diminishes the ability to work. Even sending someone to poke you with a bayonet in order to have more abilities won't work because, again, the dude with the bayonet is the subject to the same abilities/needs disbalance. So it ends up with very little needs satisfied, a lot of bayonet poking and tons of waste since the ability/need balance is calculated by vibes instead of market.
> What kind of system has work to be done but not enough jobs
A system where citizens complain about potholes but don't want to chip in to pay people to fix them - that is, they won't pay the taxes necessary. I've seen some very clean, well-financed, high-tax places in the world.
That's just one part of this issue but it's a necesssary one. And before you say, 'government just wastes money', I say, 'that's just an meaningless talking point against chipping in.' First, everyone and every organization wastes money; larger organizations have both much more power to do things but more inefficiencies, unavoidably - that applies to large software companies too. Government inefficiency can be dealt with if we want to do it; if you don't pay attention and don't vote, others will be very happy to do without you.
What kind of system has work to be done but not enough jobs
a system that doesn't provide enough education for its citizens. this is why education needs to be made available to everyone, and not just those who can afford it. especially, if you get education for free you also won't need to get a high paying job to pay off your debts.
Man, we make enough food for everyone, but throw away tons because poor people can’t pay for it. Our economy is based on scarcity. It seems to create scarcity even when there is none.
Because governments and councils waste money on paying private contractors do do stupid bullshit like installing statues or gardens or other vanity crap meanwhile grass areas are overgrown and the roads are filled with potholes.
The general populace aka the voters are too apathetic and absorbed in their little consumer lives and tribally motivated political quibbles to know or care that so much tax money is wasted.
> Potholes, park maintenance, housing shortages, pollution. As long as we're have unsatisfied needs, there's work to be done. I also see unemployment.
Stop voting for the people who have consistently allowed this to happen. We give them a tremendous amount of money. They misallocate it, waste it and allow fraud to happen to the tune of billions.
This has nothing to do with this communist/socialist view of the world that I see emanate from your comment. This is plain and simple: Government incompetence, fraud and theft.
This has nothing whatsoever to do with private industry.
This also has nothing whatsoever to do with unemployment rate. You are not going to take a 57 year old bank teller who was let go and put her to work fixing potholes on the highway.
And the connection to maximizing profits is even funnier. Do you realize that a company that maximizes profits pays more taxes? Do you realize that a person who maximizes profits through higher salaries or investments pays more taxes? Which means that the government has more money to allocate towards fixing the problems you noted?
I have stopped. I get chastised constantly for it. Leftist candidates are rare, most mainline dems are center right. I catch so much flak from vote blue no matter who types (who then go out and don't vote for Mamdani).
If candidates want my vote, they can offer literally anything as a concession. I'm not holding some purity standard.
> You are not going to take a 57 year old bank teller who was let go and put her to work fixing potholes on the highway.
You doing think there are other needs people have? Social needs, where years of customer service experience would be desirable? Or financial advice? Potholes are a stand in. Think bigger.
It's almost as if government corruption is not a byproduct of the system of government, but a byproduct of the fact that it's filled with people, and when people accrue power they will, by and large, abuse it.
> It's almost as if government corruption is not a byproduct of the system of government, but a byproduct of the fact that it's filled with people, and when people accrue power they will, by and large, abuse it.
If only there were a system to align incentives toward a common good under the assumption that everyone is corrupt and will therefore seek to maximize their own interests....
What are the incentives for corrupt people to fix potholes under a purely capitalist economy? No one's making any money from that. But it causes damages to everyone.
You need some kind of government for such things as education, healthcare, roads... fixing potholes...
> What are the incentives for corrupt people to fix potholes under a purely capitalist economy?
Well, in a purely capitalist economy, the answer would be property rights, competition, and liability. For example, a road would be owned by someone, and you could sue that someone for damages if the road damaged your car. A road owner could discharge liability risk by purchacing insurance, and insurance underwriters could require some minimum standard of maintenance from owners in exchange.
> You need some kind of government for such things as education, healthcare, roads... fixing potholes...
The whole point of the article that spawned these discussions is that society has already delegated the responsibility for fixing potholes to the government, and the government is doing a crappy enough job of fixing potholes that "art activists" need to make potholes into public art projects to get the government to actually do its job.
Some libertarians moved in the small town of Grafton, NH [0], with the explicit goal of turning it into a "Free Town".
> This resulted in eliminating funding to the county's senior-citizens council, town offices going unheated during the winter, poorly maintained roads filled with potholes, and the Grafton Police Department being reduced to one officer (the police chief), who said he was unable to answer calls for service as the town had no money to repair the one police vehicle left. Other issues were inconsistent basic public services, such as trash collection.
Most roads are unprofitable individually, but still beneficial to the greater economy. It's very unrealistic to expect private individuals to build and maintain them. And the logistics of paying for every street one drives one, and the profiteering this enables sounds hellish.
There was a time when the government was able to build and fix stuff. We should probably get to fixing that, by kicking out the parasitic contracters, actually hiring competent civil servants at competitive wages, taxing the ever-increasing wealth of the top 1%, etc. Not by privatizing roads, which is a nonsensical idea that failed miserably anytime it was tried.
The golden age of America (and the West) happened when redistributive taxation was maximal and the government had the means and the will to improve citizens life. We've been privatizing stuff ever since the 1980s with arguably disastrous results. It's time we came back to first base.
You can be a libertarian without being a capitalist, and you can be a capitalist without being a libertarian, so I'm not sure what point you're trying to make with a [completely accurate] libertarian dig when the original point was that if the system was more capitalist, it would get fixed faster and better.
> actually hiring competent civil servants at competitive wages
I think most people would be open to increasing cash government salaries if the rest of the job also matched the broader economy - at-will employment, no public sector unions, etc. You trade some of your cash compensation in the government for the cushy benefits, sub-40 hour work week and lots of time off, and the near impossibility of being fired especially once you've been there for a few decades.
The golden age of the West happened due to a war-time manufacturing boom that would put the industrial revolution to shame. If you're making a ton of money and your marginal tax rate is 90%, what incentive do you have to work another ten hours a week or open another factor or release a new product if you're only keeping 10% of what you earn?
> You can be a libertarian without being a capitalist, and you can be a capitalist without being a libertarian
If you say so, but I'm yet to meet such an individual. Anytime someone talks libertarianism, it's some kind of weird Randian objectivism, that is still somehow socially conservative, and they align themselves with the GOP more often than not.
I would consider myself pretty liberal (as in, pro-liberty). I just believe that to experience true freedom, equality is necessary. It's not enough to have the freedom to do X or Y, you also need to have the means to. Why should some people be freer than others just because they happened to be well-born?
> the system was more capitalist, it would get fixed faster and better.
The system is getting more capitalist. That's why we're having more and more potholes. After decades of neoliberal austerity and deregulation, there ain't any money left to fix shit.
What a government employee used to do in an hour of minimum wage now requires 10 government contractors who charge ludicrous sums for useless prestations, and don't even end up delivering because they've successfully lobbied themselves out of liability! You know, in the name of efficiency, since as we all know the government can't do anything by itself, and the private sector is that much more efficient.
> I think most people would be open to increasing cash government salaries if the rest of the job also matched the broader economy - at-will employment, no public sector unions, etc. You trade some of your cash compensation in the government for the cushy benefits, sub-40 hour work week and lots of time off, and the near impossibility of being fired especially once you've been there for a few decades.
I would argue that the rest of the economy should follow the standards of public servants, rather than degrade their working conditions to match this terrible job market.
> The golden age of the West happened due to a war-time manufacturing boom that would put the industrial revolution to shame.
That's a partial myth, a manufacturing boom alone is meaningless if the generated wealth isn't redistributed. Markets have never been this healthy, yet regular people aren't getting any richer.
Same thing for the industrial revolution. It didn't amount to much for the general population until the big labor movements and the invention of unions.
> If you're making a ton of money and your marginal tax rate is 90%, what incentive do you have to work another ten hours a week or open another factor or release a new product if you're only keeping 10% of what you earn?
Look, it worked in the 50s. I am not interested in the classic economist's argument of "it works in practice, but does it work in theory?". You can probably find books written by people much better informed than I am. For instance, do you know about Thomas Piketty?
Or we’ve invested far too much money in building a road network and the economic value from it either isn’t captured to sustain it OR it’s insufficient to cover costs and it’s being subsidized. Potholes being a “need” to be fixed is an interesting take when we had cobble streets and people survived fine. Pretending like capitalism is the thing that creates economic tradeoffs is incorrect and it’s just scapegoating capitalism - of course every economic system will have problems, but potholes are not uniquely a capitalism problem but more a problem of maintenance after huge capital investments for building infrastructure - maintenance is always harder and a debt that previous generations saddled us by building said infrastructure and that’s true whatever economic model you follow. China will have a similar problem in ~100-200 years as the cost to maintain all the roads, power plants, and buildings start to become a reality.
It's funny how the "hard choices" fingerwagging never comes out to scold the parts of the economy where rich people get paid for being rich in proportion to how rich they are, and it's such a dogmatic article of faith that the gross excess over there couldn't possibly have anything to do with the deprivation over here.
Yep. Move all the money into the capital economy and all the taxes into the labor economy and whoops! The well ran dry! Better cut social programs, nothing else to be done, no sir!
> Potholes being a “need” to be fixed is an interesting take when we had cobble streets and people survived fine.
Have you ever driven on a cobblestone street? There are a few in the city where I grew up and it's pretty obvious why we don't build that way anymore. It's like driving on an uneven dirt road, you're lucky to get above 25MPH consistently lest you want to risk damaging your car.
My point is that classifying it as a “need” is strange because it’s in no way the same as eating or drinking or love. It’s useful for modern society but “need” feels wrong.
Commerce drives the economy, and commerce needs roads. Even ancient Rome understood this. Once Rome could no longer protect the roads and travel ranges became shorter the economy declined much more quickly.
If society can't afford roads and therefor can no longer afford to conduct commerce, society can't afford to exist.
Last I knew China's new train system wasn't generating the income needed to pay down the construction debt. It's going to be interesting to watch how things play out long term.
I mean, I don't disagree with you. But potholes are a stand in for infrastructure repair. I bike everywhere, my bike lanes and paths have holes. Water systems still dump lead, electricity and broadband networks aren't resilient. Potholes are just visible failures we can just to analogize.
Profit isn't exactly the problem here. We could pay people to fix various kinds of infrastructure, they could make big profits, that would be great - if only they existed and had figured out their business plans.
If they have profit, we should be splitting that money towards addressing other needs. Maybe some profit is fine for ensuring sustainability or whatever, but like, potholes aren't the only need.
If money was duct tape, that would follow. I think of it as like gratitude (when paid) and influence (when gained). So we'd be grateful to the road-menders, or broadband-stabilizers, and they could accrue a big pile of influence. What will they do with it? Perhaps they want something stupid and pointless, like building a pyramid.
If we're not going to allow that, there's no need for money at all. We'd vote on what needs doing, and it would always be something like mending roads, and we'd all have to knuckle down and do it, through a conscription-like system, on pain of pain. It would never be fixing the broadband, though, because broadband is a crazy imaginative project, like building a pyramid, so there wouldn't be any.
Police need reform. Police unions need to go entirely. Police unions exist primarily to prevent police from consequences of their abuses of power. The State doesn't need unions to protect itself from its citizens.
I have friends who are cops.....the amount of shenanigans that happens behind the curtains is insane. It is literally full of high school drama, divorces, sleeping around, just all around poor behavior.
Unfortunately, the same happens in other high stress industries. Nurses are wild too.
I don’t think “high stress” is the common denominator for that kind of behavior. That just sounds like horny, immature humans - happens in lots of places.
It happens essentially everywhere. If you think it doesn't happen at your place of work, it's likely just because you haven't been included in the gossip circle.
Drama is stressful/exciting. People who have a high tolerance for stress/excitement are the ones who take on stressful jobs (nurses, police, flight attendants...) and the ones who are more tolerant of/likely to engage in drama.
A lot of this will happen without unions anyway. It seems like every country has a completely different cultural gestalt surrounding police work.
For some reason, modern police culture in american seems to increasingly value a corporatist perspective of us vs them (them being everyone who is not police), the normalization of violent response, fixation with the concept of face and widespread corruption.
Police Unions didn't create them, and abolishing them won't eliminate their lobbying power, you don't need a union to organize yourself around a lobby.
Let's not use this excuse to perpetuate the demonization of unions. After decades of increase concentration of productivity gains in the hands of capital at the expense of labor, and as we enter the AI age, this is the least thing we need.
i dont know that it's a modern phenomenon. For example law enforcement being used to attack strikers in West Virginia, cops from Los Angeles being sent to the CA border to attack Dust Bowl Okies, maybe other readers can think of others. For all the good that LE does, there has always been a strain of working for more extreme capitalist interests.
Cops (modern cops) grew out of capital trying to socialize the cost of protecting their interests. Whether it was slave patrols or dock warehouse security, central cops evolved to protect capital's interests.
The argument for a union is that they keep a company in check and the two balance each other at the negotiating table.
Public sector unions negotiate against voters and tax payers. There is really no opposite force to resist against their negotiating power and the only hard line is the state budget.
100% agree with this. Yes government's can also abuse it's workers, but society can more easily vote out an abusive government (especially locally) than an abusive CEO / board. There's no perfect solution, but police unions are a pretty good example of a worst case scenario.
Teachers don’t have state granted rights to commit violence. They also don’t have qualified immunity. The Supreme Court hasn’t decided they have no duty to protect.
Nor do they somehow have contractural agreements with their cities that limit civilian oversight and require that possible crimes by members have to be handled as internal disciplinary issues first.
Structurally this means evidence gathered by internal investigations will often be destroyed and can't be used for possible criminal charges, as well as plenty of time to tighten up stories and close ranks with each other.
"On the spectrum of" is doing a lot of heavy lifting for you there. How many teachers have shot someone in their care this year? I'm guessing very few.
Also, "definitely not zero" is an absurd bar. "One teacher did something, better condemn all teachers!"
I hate how our society has just normalized people lying blatantly to our face and still giving the benefit of the doubt. It’s how you see a violent crowd breaking windows and beating people get called a peaceful tour.
Generally I'd say public sector unions (especially in essential services) are of very questionable benefit and need limits, but robust private sector unions are much more obviously beneficial to society.
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In the private sector the incentives are mostly aligned for producing reasonable deals, because both sides rely on the business being healthy and making a profit and the jobs fundamentally rely on that.
In the public sector they aren't aligned. The politician is most incentivized to avoid immediate political turmoil. Voters are not market analysts who recognize and have a problem with deals that produce massive costs in the long-run (ex: exceptionally young or exceptionally generous retirement). The union is often aware it can extort the public with the threat of causing chaos. Government can raise taxes/take on heavier debt, which further weakens it's negotiating position - in all but the most extreme cases it won't be going into bankruptcy or ceasing to exist, taxpayers in 30 years will just be on the hook for paying a bad deal made by a previous generation.
Public sector unions, like all unions, are designed to level the power imbalance between worker and employer. Nothing about public/private employers changes this dynamic.
A better comparison is, on a sliding scale, tsa or firefighters, emts. All can invade your privacy and take / destroy your things to a varying degree. You don't get to chose which fire gets you out of your car or which EMT does cpr on you.
Can you explain what you mean by that? Are you saying "You can just drive instead" or do you mean there is a way to fly within the US without going through the TSA?
Are you talking about being able to afford a private jet? If yes, then I would hardly call it a choice. I would definitely pick private, if I could, but I believe that most people (including me) just aren't able to afford it.
Otherwise, I have no idea what you are talking about. TSA Precheck still requires you to go through TSA security checkpoints, and you still gotta get all your items scanned and walk through the security gate (you just don't need to pull your laptop out of the bag and don't need to take off your shoes). And you still might get occasionally pulled to the side for an extra check because you got randomly picked (happened to me twice in the past few years).
That logic does apply to most/all state employee unions. Teachers, fire & rescue, etc.
But as others have pointed out, police unions are even worse in that the police uniquely are allowed to wield the power of the state with lethal force (military too, but until recently, we were supposed to be protected by Posse comitatus).
are you seriously arguing that Teacher unions are just as bad? Teachers don't have the power to weild state sanctioned violence on you.
I mean, maybe you could argue about Fire Department Unions, (they can shut down events, force you from entering your home, etc) but then again, nobody has written a song called "Fuck the Fire Department"
Teachers can weaponize CPS reports and absolutely cause legal problems. I know someone who dealt with that. Their kid's doctor put the kid on an ADHD medicine, he had a bad reaction to it, and then the doctor told the mother to immediately discontinue it.
The teacher was annoyed the kid was kind of disruptive and so filed a report that the mom had committed "medical neglect" for not giving her son the meds.
She had to take off work and deal with random CPS visits until they were satisfied.
This is a kid with good grades who can read multiple grade levels higher and who is most likely bored in class. I think he was in the first grade at the time
I don't know what the consequences of that are or could have been but it raised my eyebrows
Yeah, that's a great point, thanks for sharing. One time a teacher cut in line in front of me at the grocery store, so it seems like the real problem here is teachers having too much power.
Sure, that makes the case for reform stronger for police unions, but why should bad union behavior (ie. protecting criminal or incompetent members) be tolerated at all?
>Curtailing that freedom should be a measure of last resort.
This just feels like it turns into a cudgel against whatever groups you hate. Bad police unions? Boo! Let's ban them! Bad teacher unions? Free association is protected by the constitution so they get a pass. Catholic priests? On one hand they're consistently hated on by progressives, but on the other hand much of the arguments that can be used to defend them can be applied to teachers.
This. Police routinely take away people's lives, either by shooting them needlessly, or using their power to fabricate charges or evidence against someone to ensure they spend their life in the criminal justice system.
Safford Unified School District #1 v. Redding, 557 U.S. 364 (2009) (citing Thomas v. Roberts, 323 F.3d 950 (11th Cir. 2003)("This case involves a[n] ... action brought by thirteen elementary school students ... against Tracey Morgan, their teacher [and others].... [W]e affirm[] the district court's grant of qualified immunity to the individual defendants on the children's claims.")).
I know some kids who had a really bad time in school because some teachers treated them badly. Yes, it's not as bad as what the cops can do, but it was still pretty life altering.
Dude. If it weren't for unions, you would be working 70 hours each week for a shit pay and would even have less employee rights than you have not (assuming you live in the US, based on your dismissive comment against unions)
This logic absolutely should apply to all unions, including both police and teachers unions. You can find equally disgusting anecdotes of bad teachers who are protected by their unions, with students paying the price. You can tell a lot about whether someone has impartial judgement by seeing whether they consistently support/oppose both
I would think Police unions would probably gladly accept. higher pay for more accountability. It feels like accountability sheltering is a deal with the devil that cities made.
You've never negotiated with a union rep on anything, have you?
You pay every beat cop in the country $1 million/yr and they would never agree to the level of accountability most people expect. Independent review of actions by someone outside the chain of command? Unpaid leave when you're under investigation? At-will employment? Raises and promotions based on skill, not seniority? Random, immediate, and pass-fail physical, psychological, and marksmanship tests? Most of these seem completely reasonable to most people and if you said even one of them in a contract negotiation the first order of business by the union rep would be to remove you from contract negotiation.
>you said even one of them in a contract negotiation the first order of business by the union rep would be to remove you from contract negotiation.
You can do the same thing by saying "jury nullification" during the jury duty selection process. You can watch BOTH lawyers scramble to kick you out of the room.
Cops are already paid very, very highly and should be held accountable. Cops don't take accountability and do take the pay, so your thesis is pretty well tested and didn't work.
But some people really like circuses.