Lessons from 14 years at Google

Healthy young people are less likely to buy insurance than sick older people. But if only sick older people buy insurance the payouts per insured are going to be higher. That in turn causes high premiums. Insurance works if everyone buys in, pays while they are young and relatively healthy, and gets paid healthcare when they are older and sicker.

If you “game” it, it breaks the whole system.

Now some of you might be thinking “why should a young and healthy guy like myself subsidize the old sick people?” The answer is that you will also get old.

All abstractions drop some details. If you're unlucky, you removed details that actually matter in some context. You can only make educated guesses.

Another aspect is that some abstractions are too... abstract. The concept they represent is not immediately obvious. Maybe it's a useful concept, but if it's new, it takes time to be internalized by someone for the first time.

You never reasoned why the UX is there - what other use cases does it solve? perhaps that is more important question here.

What you are describing isn't really private insurance though, its a privately run socialized healthcare system. There's nothing wrong with that, it simply isn't insurance.

"Teach your kids to kiss ass and play poltiics"(sic) ?

Does one have any significant quality time to spend with the children during the formative and developmental stages in their early lives, while engaging in major corporation sociopathetic ass-kissery?

TLDR; being an excellent (or sociopathic) ass-kisser is one way to the top; if alone at the top on your way to alone at the rest-home with kids, exes, and former employees who hate you is the desired outcome.

Are the techniques one must be adept at to manage an extensive cohort of subjects|employees|associates appropriate means of influencing the developmental progress of children, such that they can be actually happy and a beneficial influence on their own partners, progeny, and greater society?

Otherwise, does it only matter that they then have the capacity and rapacity to remain in a position to become or remain rampant over-consumers in pursuit of the most expensive visages of "happiness."

How about using the accumulated wealth in the betterment of those childrens' lives by teaching them to cooperate in meaningful adventures, to build strong and lasting relationships of kindness, to consume with regards to the full scope of the externalized costs of that consumption, to enjoy the act of creation and production of meaningful insight in art and science ?

If one's actual goal is the qualitatively and quantitatively better long term outcomes in the lives of those children; isn't a more stable and harmonious life with the reward of success measured by the reduction in suffering both within and around them by finding their own unique and innate power to imagine, cooperate, discover, and grow, all while contributing to the knowledge base and capability of humanity?

If the goal is: a widening clan of bickering, profit seeking, materialistic, continually dissatisfied workaholics with a series of divorces, early cirrhosis of the liver, to end their days spending down the accumulated wealth in a lonely senior-dementia-warehouse, well sir or madam, carry on.

The Longer part - a.k.a. "what the hell do I know about anything?":

FWIW, I am quite grateful that the fortune500 CEO/COO vater meins was principally unavailable or unable to instill most of his 'techniques' for success in my own early years. He was somewhat more present and it is debatable, malignantly, involved during more of the developmentally significant stages of my younger siblings. The results have been a mixed bag of world class success in the some arenas of life with world class catastrophic outcomes for the other arenas for at least 2/5 to 4/5 of his admitted progeny, depending on how one measures those arenas.

My own, albeit limited, advantage from milder exposure to his 'capabilities' has informed a strong aversion to the quest for infinite collateral resources and externalized risks through manipulation and deceit with and among others.

I wouldn't have it any other way, and have lived a life of immeasurable richness; having years spent with the freedom to ponder, opportunity to discover novelty, create opportunities for many to learn and participate in the arts and sciences. With the freedom to chose vainglorious poverty, indulging in a selfish amount of free time; nine years in total, doing nothing more than looking after goats and gardens in some of the wildest tropical jungle at the princely cost of less than $300 USD per month, all-in. Surviving on wild boar, feral oxen, gamefowl, marine and river fishing, all while living as prehistorically as we could imagine with my spouse and best friend. (Same person) No hot running water, barely any electricity, no petrochemical fuels, and the scarcest of rain shelter in one of the wettest places on earth. It was a kingdom unto itself, and we answered to no one for our daily needs.

Barter and trade of the product of our own two hands among the other, more civilized, inhabitants provided everything we could not make and do without. Occasional travel, by road, by air, and by sail were accomplished without needing a bank account or a land-line. We needed little, and wanted for nothing more than the continued opportunity to live among the tree frogs and roaring streams.

Tell me you're richer, without the ability to live and make lifelong friends through no hidden agenda beyond helping a community of your own choosing to do what is agreed by that community to be best for everyone; and I'll call you a fool with pockets full of money, wasting breath on children who will neither grow wise nor kind by your words and example.

Also, this isn't a sour grapes POV. I have managed a 30B PE fund, nominally in control of several hundred B worth of assets that produce significant percentages of US and global consumption of at least three commodities with properties and operations on 5 continents, and which holds patents in carbon negative and renewable power technologies and which controls some of the operations utilizing those patents. I have contributed personally to the concepts enabling bare-metal layer of hypervisor development, over 20 years ago when hardware and in-kernel virtualization were the dreams of a glorious future. I do know the difference between money and wealth, first hand. I'll take freedom over never-ending consumerism, all my live-long days.