551–560 of 590 posts
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I think you have the cars issue backwards
I don't think I do. Are you going to run a bus every 15 minutes down a road that would have one passenger an hour? Mass transit isn't viable at the density of the suburbs but building higher density there is banned.
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And broke it with congestion pricing so that only the few have the freedom to go where transit won’t or doesn’t.
Nobody goes there any more, it’s too crowded?
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The trouble is that it's both things at the same time. Countries that fix prices are paying less than their share of the R&D and the US market has bad regulations that unnecessarily limit competition. The situation you're describing can happen in one of two ways. The first is that the more bioavailable version wasn't patented in the early 20th century, only the less bioavailable version, and then the version you like…
>The second is that nobody is making a generic of the more bioavailable version even though the patent is expired. I've been taking this drug since 1995 and the brand-name version has been in production (in its current format) since 1938. I don't think there have been any substantial improvements in the formulation in decades (as evidenced by my dosage, at least.) It certainly isn't expensive due to patents. What's h…
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That electric locomotive has a really long cord attached to it - it only has about 2MW under diesel. Once you allow attaching an extension cord, electric wins ever time; there's zero competition.
Trains run on rails, which doesn't exactly allow them to go off-highway. If you're already spending a fortune on building the rail infrastructure, why wouldn't you spend a few bucks extra to install the extension cord?
So it's either extend the existing rail network, or try to build a new one entirely.
(Apparently it's something on the line of $10m/mile to add electrification, so presumably building it while building out is less, but not much less.)
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I don't think I do. Are you going to run a bus every 15 minutes down a road that would have one passenger an hour? Mass transit isn't viable at the density of the suburbs but building higher density there is banned.
We've incentivized cities to develop around highways and the automobile infrastructure instead of building them for mass transit. You need cars because we build for cars.
Zoning boards put a tiny little strip of commercial and high density residential in the downtown and then require the whole rest of the map to be single-family homes. At that point it doesn't even matter what the downtown actually looks like, people are still going to be in cars because it's the only way to get there from the suburbs.
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> More healthcare consumption = better, across the board no more paid money for less healthcare consumed = better for insurence thus all the declined treatments
Not quite true. If you own the providers, getting people to pay deductibles and copays (i.e. getting treated) will yield way more money than just having them pay premiums.
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No matter how poorly one thinks of westerners and their leaders, it is clear that in general they can look beyond themselves and their immediate surroundings when optimising their impact. The same cannot be said about Indians and other poor people from poor countries. Their optimisation lies solely on themselves or immediate family. This has consequences at every level and even at the political level.
It is just the case that the west and its leaders have had the luxury of choice and have only seen relative poverty but not absolute poverty for various reasons. When your are poor and basic necessities are difficult to meet, its natural to optimize for self and not care about the big picture.
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You are right but in a roundabout way. It’s true that most problems in US can be explained by this but it’s also true that the west and US particularly are successful because they can bypass the principal agent problem to an extent. You just have to look at India or Africa a bit to understand the severity to which this problem permeates day to day in these countries.
That's an interesting line of thought. How would you say the US/west are able to bypass this problem more effectively?
http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21598651...