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The Vaccine Had to Be Used. He Used It. He Was Fired

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Re: The Vaccine Had to Be Used. He Used It. He Was Fired

#301

Post by nickpp »

acover wrote: post #296
nickpp wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do not underestimate the power of human creativity and antreprenorial spirit when correctly motivated. The ability to sell this vaccine at obscene profits would've been extremely motivating. Now I am not in pharma I don't know how exactly the extra money would've helped, but I know that in pretty much any business more money help with new hires and better people, new machines for production lines, more wild ideas bei…

> only people that really need it would get it I think this is where we disagree. If wealth was equally distributed I would agree but wealth follows a power law distribution. People with a 1000x less money than me but with 100x more risk should get the vaccine before me. Do you know of the mythical man month problem? It seems to apply here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month

> People with a 1000x less money than me but with 100x more risk should get the vaccine before me.

And this is how you get shortages. Because there are a lot of people considering themselves at 100x risk (high demand) and very few people interested in serving them for no profit (low supply). The market laws are simple and implacable.

This is our current strategy and I consider it disastrous. But you should be pretty happy with it then. The current vaccination is run exactly according to your priorities, so kudos!

Again, I know too little about producing vaccines to know if this is a MMM situation, but based on my expertise in other fields, I highly doubt it.

Re: The Vaccine Had to Be Used. He Used It. He Was Fired

#302

Post by nickff »

Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #267
BowBun wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm generally for social welfare programs, however the idea of "welfare queens (and kings)" is NOT fiction. I come from Belgium which has this problem quite notoriously. It is quite common for people to be abusing the social programs to stay unemployed and make more income than blue-collar workers. Like you allude to, I think we need to look more deeply to address this issue - why are people satisfied doing nothing a…

> Why don't they have goals and aspirations? Who says they don't? People living on state benefits may yet have things they are passionate about. Their time is spent doing something , and sometimes that is something good for society, even though it isn't immediately profit-generating. Living in Finland I met a man who was perpetually on the dole, but he was an extremely active Wikipedia editor, for example. I have oft…

Your comment actually illustrates one thing I find repulsive about basic income proposals; many people seem to want basic income to finance a life of vanity, where they help no one more than themselves.

Re: The Vaccine Had to Be Used. He Used It. He Was Fired

#303

Post by username90 »

clairity wrote: post #271
mumblemumble wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If so, then I guess we're arguing over a straw man? Because that argument would be a great response to a suggestion that we just end welfare, but it doesn't really make much sense as a response to a comment about the idea of massively expanding it by replacing it with universal basic income.

ubi would not change the dynamics. the same trivial rent-seeking would happen, but it’s still irrelevant if what you really care about is rent-seeking as economic drag/inefficiency, not ideological concerns.

UBI gives people control over their own money. Food stamps for example gives poor people a disproportionally large food budget which studies has shown makes them fat. People who are equally poor but aren't on food stamps are healthier than those who get it, even though their purchasing power increased.

So only reason to give them food stamps instead of just giving them money is to feed money into grocery stores and to create government bureaucracy jobs. If you scrapped the entire program and just gave people money poor people would be healthier, the government would be leaner and the poorer would have more money to spend on stuff they need.

Re: The Vaccine Had to Be Used. He Used It. He Was Fired

#304

Post by _cloudkate »

tedmcory77 wrote: post #73

I feel like we've lost sight of the fact that we're trying to vaccinate as many people as possible as soon as possible.

totally agree. I get sad every time I hear vaccines were thrown away because people didn't show for their appointment :(

Re: The Vaccine Had to Be Used. He Used It. He Was Fired

#305

Post by Aerroon »

lostcolony wrote: post #237
spion wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UBI or progressive negative tax should solve this problem, no? (The idea is that a job always gets you more money than the base)

Yeah. It's super easy to fix, if people wanted to fix it. Even with welfare, you just make it so every after tax dollar earned reduces the welfare check by 50 cents. Tada, incentive to work, and only when you're making double what welfare pays out do you stop receiving assistance. People may still 'take advantage' of it, by choosing not to work (if we got rid of all the systems requiring proof they're trying to find…

How is it a super easy fix? It seems extremely unaffordable. Forget incentive to work. The US had a tax revenue of $3.5 trillion with a population of a 330 million. You shut down the entire government and spend it on UBI. That's $883 per person per month.

But it's worse than that. Wealth doesn't appear out of thin air. Money might, but money only matters insofar as what you can spend it on. If only 300 million apples are produced then no amount of moving money around will allow everyone (330m) to get an apple. You're not poor when your dollar wealth or income is low, you're poor when you can't get the stuff you need or want.

If you want to have a UBI without sending prices of everyday goods soaring then you need cheap production of those goods in quantities that will satisfy your population. The only realistic way of doing this in the modern world is automation. The cost of production for a lot of (most?) goods comes down to how much it costs all of the human labor that's combined to produce it. Eg in the case of apples somebody has to select which apple trees to grow, acquire land, invest in it, maintain them, pick the apples, sort them, find a buyer, transport them etc. All of these require some human labor and therefore have some significant cost. The more of this you can automate the lower the costs of these apples.

Whether UBI works will ultimately come down to the efficiency of production (or alternatively, shifting the poverty to another country that does the cheap production for you, but this can't last). You need to be able to satisfy the needs of the population with the labor of the part of the population that are net tax contributors.

Re: The Vaccine Had to Be Used. He Used It. He Was Fired

#306

Post by JoshTko »

HelloMcFly wrote: post #89
JoshTko wrote: post #65

This is a complex issue. Ideally we would have a much better organized rollout avoiding these scenarios. I don't think we ever want individual physicians using their own contacts list to find candidates regardless of good intention, it just opens the door up too much abuse. I don't think the penalty matches the crime, certainly not a criminal prosecution.

If we can confidently confirm that 1) there are leftover vaccines, 2) good-faith efforts were made to administer them to the target audience, and 3) there were leftover vaccines that were definitely otherwise going to go to waste then I'm 100% fine with people administering to their contact list. I'd rather that 1000x over than unused vaccines be tossed into the garbage. We all lose with unused vaccines.

It's just poor design to allow for good-faith. It's too easy for a bad actor to artificially create "leftover" doses to give to friends and family. Just don't allow doctor discretion and organize better for the next day, problem solved.

Re: The Vaccine Had to Be Used. He Used It. He Was Fired

#307

Post by lostcolony »

mgbennet wrote: post #272
lostcolony wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. It's super easy to fix, if people wanted to fix it. Even with welfare, you just make it so every after tax dollar earned reduces the welfare check by 50 cents. Tada, incentive to work, and only when you're making double what welfare pays out do you stop receiving assistance. People may still 'take advantage' of it, by choosing not to work (if we got rid of all the systems requiring proof they're trying to find…

I don't know if the drop off of assistance can really work that well. Say UBI is 10000 fun-bucks. A person gets a crappy job that pays 5000 fun-bucks. Their total income is now 5000+(10000-5000*.5)=12500. By getting a job and working, they've only improved their situation by 2500. Any dollar they earn above the UBI is taxed at 50%, until they've "made it" to double UBI. This amounts to taxing the poor instead of the…

Yep. UBI -is- meant to be universal, and I'd be for it.

I'm just saying, even without a UBI, the existing system could be made to work. 50% is just a number thrown out there; it can be reduced, it can be non-linear. The point is that as long as there is no cliff, no point where if you make $1 extra by working you net -lose- money, we avoid the existing issue.

As to whether there is enough utility at any given total income to warrant the extra work...that's a 'problem' we have now, and always will have. Presented with the opportunity, do I want to turn my time into money? That's entirely dependent on how much I value each of those things.

There's actually a reason I chose 50%, beyond it just being a nice round number. See, if the federal minimum wage was upped to $15 at the same time as changing welfare like this, we'd be able to institute the fall off while making the benefit of working those hours feel like the same amount of buying power as working now. Only difference is, essentially, that everyone making less than 2x welfare/etc benefits, would see a larger increase even than that.

Re: The Vaccine Had to Be Used. He Used It. He Was Fired

#308

Post by karpierz »

skrowl wrote: post #287
floatingatoll wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would think that given what we’ve done here in the US to the past forty years of workers, they’ve earned a decade off to live on UBI and heal from burnout and develop interests of any sort in anything at all again, before we could even begin to productively analyze their reactions to UBI. They’ve been traumatized and it will take time to heal and I certainly hope that we implement UBI and let them do so. We can aff…

210,000,000 working age adults in the USA * 40,000/year UBI welfare handouts * a decade = 84 TRILLION dollars. The US govt is currently spending about 2 trillion / year more than they take from their citizens in taxes. Out of curiosity, what makes you think "We can afford it as a country"?

Out of curiosity, why did you cite a "deficit per year" figure for context, but provide a "cost per decade" figure for UBI?

Re: The Vaccine Had to Be Used. He Used It. He Was Fired

#309

Post by topspin »

defen wrote: post #297
topspin wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please consider that such views complicate efforts to deliver justice. Recognizing inequities and the potential for inequities before they emerge is crucial to achieving equity and justice.

This is like the trolley problem, but even dumber. You have a trolley headed for a bunch of people. You can throw a switch to take some people out of the path of the trolley, or do nothing. You are suggesting that doing nothing is better, because that way there won't be "equity" disparities in trolley victims.

Correcting historical equity disparities such as unfair distribution of medicines is one example of the steps necessary to achieve a just world. Note that placing the term equity in quotes as you have done can be seen as implying some qualification of the concept, as though it is in doubt or not legitimate. I'd ask that you please avoid this in the future.

Re: The Vaccine Had to Be Used. He Used It. He Was Fired

#310

Post by NMDaniel »

wycy wrote: post #124

It would be so simple to have a system where everyone can sign up with the local health department to receive extra doses at the end of the day. If there are extra doses, you receive a text message and have 10 minutes to confirm that you'll be there within the hour, otherwise it moves on to the next person. There should be no reason a single dose of this stuff should ever go to waste.

You don't even need a system

In Israel, before vaccines were made available to the entire public, people created Facebook groups reporting clinics which had spare vaccines, nurses would even go outside and offer random passerbys an option to get vaccinated.

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