The financial costs of healthcare costs, or, is keeping me alive worth it?

I think trained consumerism is a big part of it. People are trained to think (usually erroneously) that the solution to every problem is a product or service.

X will make me happy, Im sad because I dont have Y. There are absolutely outside forces pushing this, but there is also a deficit of cultural forces and norms pushing back. Its not that people are being bombed by advertising for expensive burials, but that they have low experience with excellent and cheap alternatives. Human culture is slow to change, and usually does so on the order of decades or generations. Any impact from things like books will be at the margin, especially since most readers are already inclined to agree.

Illegal in the Philippines. After years of struggle developing a product that (1) really worked and (2) anybody wanted. There are 200+ other countries in the world.

It's approved in the U.S., Canada and other countries but they don't sell it. Given that they are politicizing it so much you think they might grow 10 tons of it somewhere and sell small quantities of it so people could try it out ("get a $20 bag of rice and support its development") but (a) it defeats the narrative they're being victimized by Greenpeace and (b) people may or may not like the sensory characteristics.

I don't know how the GR2 trait itself impacts other agronomic characteristics but there is a principle that if an organism is spending energy on one thing it is going to have less for other things. A more definitely problem is that a small number of GR2 seed lines compete with a very large number of other rice lines. Even if the GR2 trait is neutral in other respects, the GR2 rice that is actually developed could be "ok" but not competitive with other seeds you could get.

In the US there is a staggering variety of Bt corn or Roundup-Ready soybean seeds because the technology has been licensed to and picked up by most of the big seed vendors so farmers can get seeds that perform well for them. Farmers want these crops because they help their bottom line. If somebody tries to ban them, they'll fight back.

PRRI doesn't have a lot of resources to develop a variety of optimized seeds, it doesn't have the deep relationships with seed vendors that (say) Monsanto has, it doesn't have a lot of enthusiasm from possible customers in the Philippines. If local farmers, public health authorities and such had organized to support it there could have been a different outcome. As it is PRRI comes across as another out-of-touch NGO.

There are all kinds of little silly things such as the fact that they will start charging you if you grow more than $10,000 worth of it. If they really are out to save people from illness, change the world, and normalize the idea of transgenic crops, they should be giving it away for free.

> Keeping anybody alive is worth it.

This might be true on average. But if you need to spend $1 million keeping a death row inmate alive who tried to commit suicide, that money might be better spent on infants with heart defects. Money being finite (and being an abstraction of medical equipment/expertise/hours which are also finite), you ultimately have scenarios where you have to choose one or the other.

> This shows how destructive capitalism is: In its pursuit of maximizing the profits

If something costs more than you can afford, then it is unaffordable. This remains true even for those who despise capitalism. The great innovation of communism was the destruction of all the data that would allow one to have insight about whether or not something was unaffordable or not. In the United States, insurance companies are heavily regulated, and premiums must reflect how much it costs to pay out claims, plus some small percentage for overhead. Nor do the hospitals themselves strictly seek profit... their adversarial relationship with insurance companies compels them to overbill in the theory that if one claim fails, the next can succeed... so price it for both.

Profit-minimization isn't a very good strategy for long-term anything. If you want to be able to stay in business until next year so you can perform surgeries, you might have to, I dunno, at least break even.

Both of those are at the low end of cooking time * temperature. Mashed potatoes provide essentially zero vitamin C same with many potato soups. https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/fdc-app.html#/food-details/170699/n...

365 calories of raw potatoes have 155% of your daily vitamin C requirement. A 365 calories serving of French fries has ~9% of your daily vitamin C requirements. Of course the cooking oil is part of that difference, but few cooked foods have much vitamin C. Worse many things like rice, bread, or beer provide none.

So you need some aspect of your diet to be a plentiful supply or take a supplement.

Oh my god man rent free