41–50 of 421 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Price absolutely still exists in government run health care… do you have any idea how it actually works in developed countries?
He's probably referring to price controls, which basically everyone else has.
When engineers are not subject to licensure, don't be surprised when management, pushed by bean counters, let the bean counters make the decisions.
Subject engineers to licensure, including ethics clauses, including clauses for building for repairability and minimum expected product lifetimes. Legally protect engineers from dismissal or retribution for invoking these clauses. Then see how much crap we continue to build.
It'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.
It'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…
Here they just say that we need better voting algorithms, which is a necessary but not sufficient fix — we’re not stuck with this bad electoral system because we couldn’t figure out a better one, we’re stuck here because it benefits those in power.
Also this essay could do with a bit more “and AI is going to exacerbate this injustice” but that’s my bias lol
> We could be running fiber-optic cable to every house in America, and we even know how much it would cost. That's the problem, isn't it? It costs too much. Of course we can fix everything, we could also do everything in the universe, but the question is at what cost? So here's my modest proposal: > I am here to remind you that it will only get worse unless we do something. The problem isn't painful enough. Have you…
as 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…
That's pretty silly. The 'economic race to the bottom' is exactly how we can all afford microwave ovens in the first place. Of course, you can make a special case for microwave ovens, and we could afford them to be slightly more expensive. But we need the general cost cutting and optimization in the economy to drive progress.
The pro- and anti-capitalist sides both have a point.
> We could be running fiber-optic cable to every house in America, and we even know how much it would cost. That's the problem, isn't it? It costs too much. Of course we can fix everything, we could also do everything in the universe, but the question is at what cost? So here's my modest proposal: > I am here to remind you that it will only get worse unless we do something. The problem isn't painful enough. Have you…
For example, we lie about how the problem came to be, institute a censorship framework to prevent scientists from discussing it, spend months preventing solutions from reaching the consumers because we can't figure out how to issue permits, institute policies guaranteed to make the problem much worse, rally against solutions that could make it less bad because it allows us to take cheap shots about political opponents, lie about various aspects of the problem because it looks to us more convenient if people behaved as if they believed the lies, institute draconian policies that make absolutely no sense but allow the politicians to declare they are "serious about it", allow the same politicians to blatantly and constantly violate the same policies, dial the censorship to 11 to suppress public discussion of these policies, spend enormous amounts of money on things that do not work, distribute even more enormous amount of money to fraudsters, because we don't have time to bother checking who needs help and who doesn't, and so on, and so forth...
Yeah, you are right, as a society we did a lot. We shouldn't have done most of it, but there's no denying it, it is a lot.
> "When historians write the epitaph for neoliberalism, they will have to conclude that it was the form of capitalism that systematically prioritized political imperatives over economic ones. That is: given a choice between a course of action that will make capitalism seem like the only possible economic system, and one that will make capitalism actually be a more viable long-term economic system, neoliberalism has meant always choosing the former."
> [...]
> "If the ultimate aim of neoliberal capitalism is to create a world where no one believes any other economic system could really work, then it needs to suppress not just any idea of an inevitable redemptive future, but really any radically different technological future at all. There’s a kind of contradiction here. It cannot mean convincing us that technological change has come to an end—since that would mean capitalism is not really progressive. It means convincing us that technological progress is indeed continuing, that we do live in a world of wonders, but to ensure those wonders largely take the form of modest improvements (the latest iPhone!), rumors of inventions about to happen (“I hear they actually are going to have flying cars pretty soon”), even more complex ways of juggling information and imagery, and even more complex platforms for the filling out of forms."
The system we are in is inert and we need more than ranked voting to fix it.