51–60 of 65 posts
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This is a realistic concern. I can't understand why peopleare downvoting it.
There are at least two reasons: First is Hanlon’s Razor; “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity”. It appears to be especially applicable here. Second is that this kind of information (with far richer data) is already accessible to and used by corporations at scale; think credit bureaus, background checkers, etc.
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Maybe; he is advocating for a safety net. But I note he didn't say that either and, being an economist, he would probably have had the standard reservations - what exactly is the upper limit of care being provided to someone for "cancer"? It is very vague. If people still sometimes die of cancer when spending $X there is always room to spend $X+1 until the money runs out. No entity in existence can cover that sort of…
> what exactly is the upper limit of care being provided to someone for "cancer"? It is very vague. It is light on detail but that feels tangential to me? Much like private insurance schemes, state healthcare systems necessarily have a limit on care/expense. > He clearly isn't advocating for what would be called universal state-funded healthcare in the modern context ... He appears to be talking about ... certain rar…
"common hazards of life against which, because of their uncertainty, few individuals can make adequate provision" does not technically include arthritis, diabetes, cancer and so on. Most people can make adequate provisions against those things. The median wage in the west is north of $50,000 - that is a huge amount of slack available for saving for the likelihood of sickness.
And insurance in that passage probably means actual insurance. The modern conception of universal government funded healthcare is a long way from that.
If you focus on specific phrases I'm certainly happy to admit it is a reasonable read. The issue is in context of the entire sentences and, indeed, the nature of the book itself it isn't the most likely meaning of the passage. He's not advocating for universal, government funded healthcare in the sense that it gets used in modern everyday conversation.
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I don't recall the details of Ayn's moral arguments because they aren't of great interest to me, but there just isn't a fundamental inconsistency between campaigning against welfare and accepting welfare. There isn't any hypocrisy in pointing out that something creates horrible incentives, then doing what the incentives suggest. If anything it is a great show of consistency in belief. The alternative position would b…
You have literally, repeatedly demonstrated you don’t understand what principles or integrity mean. Your “crazy” position is literally it. You are simply greedy: well if everyone else is doing it so should I. That is panic mode caused by a real trauma from scarcity. Or naivety. Or cringe apathy. Or mild sociopathy.
But that isn't hypocrisy. Ayn's philosophical position was comfortable with the idea that everyone is greedy and her moral arguments were rooted in the observation that people will generally do what they can. It isn't reasonable to call someone a hypocrite or lacking integrity if they lay out a high-integrity moral position then stick to it. It isn't even a fallacy as much as an argument-from-not-listening-to-what-she-said.
This isn't complicated. If you pay $100 in taxes to the government then draw $80 in cheques from the government it'd be a rare anti-tax argument that has a moral problem with the $80 part. Most would argue the number should be $100 and might make an argument that the $20 disappeared in beurecratic overheads.
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Yup. They get reused, and people can get new ones or sometimes multiple at the same time...
Why? Are they stupid?
My deep suspicion, given some of the players involved in DOGE, is that most of this information is being exfiltrated for the purposes of training AI models. They'll likely be used for social and political manipulation of groups and possibly even individuals. There's a big market for "pre-crime" solutions which will also rely heavily on this type of data and are already being deployed by various state-level law enforc…
Is there talk about DOGE working to combine various government databases as a new data project for the government?
I worked in marketing during Web 1.0–the brochureware era. I know all too well the difference between then and the modern web today.
What’s the point if it’s not to unify design AND data?!
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> what exactly is the upper limit of care being provided to someone for "cancer"? It is very vague. It is light on detail but that feels tangential to me? Much like private insurance schemes, state healthcare systems necessarily have a limit on care/expense. > He clearly isn't advocating for what would be called universal state-funded healthcare in the modern context ... He appears to be talking about ... certain rar…
We're talking about one vague paragraph in a book that was making a lot of heavy arguments against any level of government planning. It isn't at all clear he was talking about any of those specific things. "common hazards of life against which, because of their uncertainty, few individuals can make adequate provision " does not technically include arthritis, diabetes, cancer and so on. Most people can make adequate p…
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My understanding is that they're not even guaranteed to be unique.
Yup. They get reused, and people can get new ones or sometimes multiple at the same time...
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Yup. They get reused, and people can get new ones or sometimes multiple at the same time...
Source? From what I can gather they're supposed to be unique and they don't reuse them. If two people have the same number then it's a mistake.