discounts. its all pre-calculated in the price
cold calling.
also robo-calls.
Recycling being the responsibility of the consumer
Windows
Dental care being treated as separate from health care.
You can die from teeth issues
Honestly, just health care in general being locked behind insurance to the point where people conflate the two conceots entirely!
Dental insurance in most cases is closer to what health insurance should be: an entirely optional, and generally affordable, policy that can offset major expenses. Not an expense that rivals housing in magnitude and is required for most people just to access the basic care needed by nearly everyone.
Or maybe we do away with the insurance all together and treat medical care as the public service it should be yeah?
Just taking this opportunity to remind Americans that you already pay a far higher portion of the public purse into your healthcare system than any nation with universal care. You get basically nothing for it while we get cradle to grave coverage for every citizen regardless of our socioeconomic status.
Then on top of these taxes you are also paying private insurers for the privilege of then paying your doctors
Yeah… It’s only like that for 1 country
You can die from teeth issues, you need teeth to properly digest food with since you chew on it, people really do judge you a lot on whether you have good teeth, attractive teeth is important, nobody likes bad breath, nobody likes yellowed teeth .etc
And it is stupidly expensive to deal with.
A lot of people don’t take these things in to account. Due to health issues I have slowly lost my teeth over the past 15 years. Due to poverty and systemic problems I couldn’t get them fixed. Now I’m in my 40s and left with barely enough teeth to chew - no molars, and my face is shifting because it doesn’t have the support structure anymore, which puts painful pressure on my remaining teeth all the time. Technically my health benefits say they pay for dentures but it’s been nothing but a run around, months and months of waiting for paperwork to be mailed and just utter nonsense while I’m here with a handful of teeth and I’m scared to talk to people or make friends because as soon as people see my teeth the judge me and leave.
This makes perfect sense from the supply side. Very few (younger) people need expensive medical care, so we can pool the risk. Almost everyone needs some, regular dental care, so it’s more like a savings account than insurance. I’m not claiming that the insurance systems in any given country aren’t exploitative, just that medical and dental insurance should be different.
Or maybe we stop treating everything as a money printing thing and instead as taking care of the population around us? The money is there, we just need to stop bombing girl’s schools in Iran or building a golden shrine to Fuhrer Trump.
We shouldn’t have fucking health insurance or dental insurance period.
I mean, I agree with the first part fully, but I think what you mean is that we shouldn’t have for-profit corporate run insurance.
Any socialised health care is a form of insurance—a way for us to pool the risk of large bad events, so that everyone (or a lot of people) pays a little so that a few people aren’t totally destroyed by the catastrophe. The alternative to having insurance is that we let people die when rare but really bad things happen. We absolutely should have insurance, but we should all share the cost equally, or the rich should pay more, rather than a few people massively profiting from running the enterprise.
But, however we run it, we’ll need to treat dental differently from medical because of what I said in my first comment
No forget insurance altogether. Socialized health care is absolutely not a form of insurance. That’s not what any of those words mean.
You might be thinking of single payer healthcare but that’s not what I’m arguing for. It feels like you’ve got a very high school level understanding of words and are trying to discuss concepts without understanding the distinction and mashing things together. Just because things might have a few overlapping points doesn’t make them the same thing. That’s not how language works.
A government run system, of which only two exist that I know of, the NHS and IHS (Indian healthcare system for native Americans), are not insurance. They aren’t a pooling of risk, they’re a taxpayer paid service. It’s a complete flip from what insurance is. Just because they have to pool taxpayer money to fund it does not make it insurance.
What?
Government funded and administered health care systems being a form of risk pooling and insurance are not controversial ideas. These are standard definitions.
I’m not sure where you’re getting these ideas. Why would taxpayer paid services not be a form of risk pooling? There are hundreds of countries around the world with government run health systems, or government funded and privately run systems, or private-public partnerships in various forms. Pooling taxpayer money to fund health care for those individuals unlucky enough to need it absolutely does make it insurance.
I recommend reading the Wikipedia pages on “universal health care” and “health insurance” if you’d like to start learning about these topics.
I’m an academic statistician who discusses risk and related concepts with experts every day…
And I do data analysis for a hospital chain (spent time today figuring out what percent of people in our hospital system are underinsured in different risk categories such as tobacco cigarette smokers and such). Your point about being a statistician means nothing.
So you can calculate p-values big whoop. You’re absolutely not using terms the way the average person does in my day to day in industry and conflating them. I’ve been all over those Wikipedia pages plenty.
Try again.
Just curious, and I’ll admit it’s too my discredit that I’m even engaging, but why are you behaving this way?
Passive income. If value is being created and you’re being presented some of it without doing any work it necessarily means that someone else isn’t receiving the full value of the work they’re doing.
subset of capitalism
Absolutely
In most cases I agree with you, but what about a musician who makes passive income off of people streaming their music, or people who buy my fonts?
Cap it at the original 28 years after creation. The current 70 years after the creator’s death is ridiculous.
Why should you be paid in perpetuity for work you did once? I’d love it if someone paid me residules for the work I did today making widgets.
Not passive income, they did the work of creating the music or the font
Doesent all passive income require some upfront work outside of investing?
Or you’re squeezing all the value and more out of the asset and users, while increasing externalities
Sounds cool til you realize the assets being squeezed are mostly just other people
No no no. I gave them CULTURE! A wonderful work culture.
And security! Sure, not the security I decided I need for myself, and it’s only really present as long as they’re profitable to me, but security nonetheless.
After all, I had the idea and stuck my neck out to secure the financing, which is far more important than the actual daily labor that keeps things running.
We’re like a family, see.
Even if the assets aren’t people, not squeezing value is required to maintain some fun and life as well as long term sustainability. If you squeeze it, you might squeeze it dry. I hate all the adverts everywhere. Can I just go somewhere to save my eyes…
The stock market. It’s not investment, it’s gambling. It’s also rigged by the power brokers and insider traders.
Societal expectations to move out of your parents’ house when you turn 18. It’s a scam to get you to become more profitable to corporate America. You’re an adult now. You need to buy a car you can’t afford, get a mortgage you don’t want, insure it all to protect the bank, all to go to a job you don’t want, but now need so that you can afford these “nice things.”
But if you stay with your parents, even if you actually enjoy it, you’re a failure.
Privatization of government institutions and programs.
Seriously this. The success of a public service shouldn’t be how much revenue is generated or shareholder value is gained. We as a society are the shareholders and deserve infrastructure that works for us. Corporations have pushed the idea that lower taxes is better, but when you have to spend more to a company to get basic necessities, you’re not really coming out on top buddy.
Regan really did a number on the US. Broad privatization of public services, with all the wrong incentives in place. Which was then a vicious cycle of people hating their experience with public services -> politicians cut their funding -> service gets worse -> people hate their experience -> repeat until all your taxes have been siphoned to private entities and your govt is in shambles.
Let’s be clear Reagan started it but Clinton really kicked it into overdrive. Privatization is unfortunately bipartisan.
Listened to a really good podcast episode on this recently
Nobody wants public school anymore and the private schools are booming. Source: am private school teacher
Yes people want public schools.
Car finance. It’s so prevalent, I think I’m literally the only one on our road that doesn’t drive a 1 year old, brand new, financed car. Literally everyone is like “but it’s only $499/month and I can just hand it back when I want a new one”. Well shit, yes, but try tallying up what you’ve paid for running all these new cars every three years.
Save up instead and continue saving after you bought the car. Then you can afford a different car later.
Ending a price in .99 so you think it is a whole dollar less.
I honestly don’t understand that, I have always rounded up for money going out and down for money coming in. So if I see something priced at $3.25 my brain thinks $4, and if I earn $3.25 my brain thinks $3 dollars.
Ah but then you’ll also see something priced at 3.99 as 4, same as something priced at 3.25
But it works! Supposedly. Don’t poke holes in the JC penney story.
That’s because it’s so normalized we don’t even realize it’s a scam anymore.
Ive always thought it was due tax related reasons. In México, most shops have it set up so the price + IVA (our consumer tax) gives you a rounded number.
Paying for education that “the market” wants us to have so they can have a larger pool of skilled workers, leading to lower salaries
college textbooks. have to have the latest edition for class, but almost nothing is different from the two-years-old one.
I once had a professor who gave assignments with the last several editions page numbers because he thought it was bullshit too.
in roughly half of my classes; my professors were the authors of the of the books that they were selling so they made photocopies of them to distribute to the student for free.
it was one of two benefits to attending the largest university in the country (at the time).
I walked my students through where to find the pdf of the text book in the first class after we covered the syllabus.
For my classes, anything that was graded was not done from the textbook it was either online questions or from a worksheet. Any work given from the textbook was just for our practice and not graded. They’d usually just call out sections of questions based on that day’s lesson.
This is why I try, if possible, to find them online for free. That’s been my first step whenever needed. Last time I needed a book and lab access code, it cost a little over $150USD!
Insurance.
Insurance- paying for something you might never need but required to be available JUST IN CASE. eyeroll
Then you’re denied it regardless.
correction, you do an ungodly amount of paperwork prior to getting denied.
I learned today, that if insurance companies come to the conclusion that your death was a suicide, then they don’t even have to pay out your life insurance to your family. Pretty messed up.
And if you die you lose everything you paid for and your family gets none. Sounds great!
The Dutch East India Company is still alive and well.
The stock market
This is what I came here to say! It generates zero wealth, and only serves to move wealth from one person to another.
Only if you don’t have insider info.
