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We Could Fix Everything, We Just Don't
11–20 of 421 posts
Re: We Could Fix Everything, We Just Don't
#12as this fantastic video about the popcorn button explains. Our economic race to the bottom has been sabotaging almost every aspect of engineering in our society. To save a few cents per microwave, the cheap microwaves don’t include a humidity sensor and then lie about having a popcorn button when it can’t actually work properly, which leads to everyone saying “don’t use the popcorn button” and now nobody uses the pop…
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Re: We Could Fix Everything, We Just Don't
#13I have a saying, “Capitalism is the means by which we screw each other over.” But it’s better than the alternative “Communism, the lack of means by which we screw each other over.” I don’t think Socialism is the answer, which is simple Capitalism with bits of Communism sprinkled in to soothe over the more egregious failures (or to pretend to do, which is even worse). We need something truly new.
how did hackernews brew so many well compensated communists.
Re: We Could Fix Everything, We Just Don't
#14>It happened because the people writing the image parsers made an incredibly stupid mistake and then didn’t bother testing it, because the software industry doesn’t bother with QA anymore.
I too remember the good old days when software used to be written without security vulnerabilities, especially in media format parsers.
Oh wait, that never existed. In fact in the old days people cared even less about security.
Re: We Could Fix Everything, We Just Don't
#15It's ironic for him to suggest government-run healthcare when it doesn't benefit from the #1 best coordinator of resources on the planet - price. He accidentally highlights the reason we have so many coordination failures - smart people with little wisdom think they can solve every problem, using other people's money, with no consequences for their failure. Not everyone should get free college, and not every house sh…
Price absolutely still exists in government run health care… do you have any idea how it actually works in developed countries?
PP is referring to the price mechanism of markets. Not an arbitrary set price set by a regulator / central planner.
By definition if government runs a sector, there can be no pricing mechanism. Otherwise the government isn’t running it; it’s just a market.
Re: We Could Fix Everything, We Just Don't
#16It's ironic for him to suggest government-run healthcare when it doesn't benefit from the #1 best coordinator of resources on the planet - price. He accidentally highlights the reason we have so many coordination failures - smart people with little wisdom think they can solve every problem, using other people's money, with no consequences for their failure. Not everyone should get free college, and not every house sh…
Price absolutely still exists in government run health care… do you have any idea how it actually works in developed countries?
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Re: We Could Fix Everything, We Just Don't
#17No, we can’t “fix everything” because not everyone agrees that these are problems which need solving, or that your proposed solutions are actually an improvement.
I feel like most people go through this thought process around junior year in college. “If only they would put me in charge, I could fix everything.” Yes, the world is not that simple, what a surprise…
Re: We Could Fix Everything, We Just Don't
#18It's ironic for him to suggest government-run healthcare when it doesn't benefit from the #1 best coordinator of resources on the planet - price. He accidentally highlights the reason we have so many coordination failures - smart people with little wisdom think they can solve every problem, using other people's money, with no consequences for their failure. Not everyone should get free college, and not every house sh…
> when it doesn't benefit from the #1 best coordinator of resources on the planet - price
Price is arguably #1 in info-symmetric non-urgent elastic demand situations.
Which portions of health care function this way is left as an exercise for the reader.
Re: We Could Fix Everything, We Just Don't
#19It's ironic for him to suggest government-run healthcare when it doesn't benefit from the #1 best coordinator of resources on the planet - price. He accidentally highlights the reason we have so many coordination failures - smart people with little wisdom think they can solve every problem, using other people's money, with no consequences for their failure. Not everyone should get free college, and not every house sh…
If all you've got is a hammer then every problem begins to resemble a nail. But some problems actually require a screwdriver.
The problem with price signals in health care is that they compete with survival signals, and the survival signals sometimes win out.
This makes health care an example of a situation where (traditional) markets become distorted and fail to operate efficiently. A little external help is needed.
Re: We Could Fix Everything, We Just Don't
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