Things we'd be talking about if the forum wasn't deadFollow

These people, I want to be them. Happiness is a 4 story high beachball.

Either that or Lego got a lot more realistic looking.

I wonder if insurance still pays out if your admitted to the hospital from injuries sustained from being crushed under a mass of people trying to catch a giant ball. If nothing else it would be a fun aside trying to explain the notes in your medical records to each new doctor you have over the next 40 years.

You're just asking to be trapped in a groundhog day loop while a semi-competent hero collects a bunch of masks with a name like Clock Town, really. I blame the founders for everything.

Fisher Scientific approves this message.

That's no moon, it's a traffic hazard!

Initial reports were saying that it was "intentional, but not terrorism". What the people they were quoting meant was, "It has no known ties to international terrorism and there's nothing to worry about as it's likely a lone wolf type thing." What the initial headlines made it sound like to me was, "Someone was just blowing up a gopher and mistakes were made. Nothing to see here."

Finally have some time to respond to some of these older threads, so...



The last three (four?) in your list? Correct. The first two? Incorrect. The latter things are actually things that government should provide to the people. The former are just not (one could even argue that emergency services may not need to be provided by government either, but that's an edge case IMO).



We're never not going to need food, yet that's done via for-profit methods. Seems to work just fine. I think the key point you're missing here is that when something is for-profit, it means that every player in that market is in competition with every other player. Which, universally, tends to lower prices for consumers while increasing quality. The point I was trying to make earlier about profit vs non-profit and how it applies to greed is that greed exists in either case. The only difference is how that greed manifests itself. Pretending that if you change the methods we use it'll magically change base human nature is silly in the extreme. People will still be greedy and greedy people will find a way to enrich themselves in any system we use.

In a for-profit environment, the way for the greedy to gain money is to provide the best product they can for the lowest price they can. That's a good thing. In a non-profit environment, the way for the greedy to gain money is to game the government policies that fund their operation so as to bloat their salaries as much as possible, provide as much benefits as possible, and otherwise milk the public funds to the greatest degree possible. When your funding is dependent on pleasing the government decision makers, you've created a massive opportunity for corruption and waste. And when those decision makers often measure success in these areas, not by the results, but purely by the dollars spent, you get runaway inefficiency and waste.

At the end of the day, the question should not be "how much profit did they generate?", but "how much value did they provide for each dollar they charged?". And in many (most?) cases for-profit organizations do a better job in terms of "bang for buck" then non-profits, especially if the entire industry is for-profit, since that means they have to come up with better cost efficiencies in order to compete. A non-profit might not keep as much of the revenue as "profit", but that may not matter if the goods or services they are providing cost more per unit than they would otherwise.

It's a difficult thing for most people to see because if you just take a snapshot of the industry right now, it seems obvious that if you eliminated profits, that would reduce costs to the users of the good/services being provided. And you'd be correct. But once you do that, as time goes by, with little or no motivation to continue to maintain the cost/quality of those goods and services (or to improve them even!), the delta of what you get for any given cost grows in a non-profit industry versus what it would have been in a for-profit one. Imagine if, for example, the government had decided to make the entire Television industry non-profit. Maybe they decide that TV is so important for national communication that it comes under a "government service". Maybe they also decide to pay for every household in the US to have one of these essential devices. Can you imagine what your TV would look like today? You'd have one TV per home. It would be a huge tube TV. Probably still black and white (cause there's no "need" for color, right?). And it would be "free", except we'd probably be collectively paying the equivalent of several hundred dollars per TV per year in taxes for the necessity of government provided television.

Oh. And the content would suck too. We'd probably only have like one station in each area. No cable, of course.

The kind of system you're proposing is great at providing the current level and quality of something to the masses. It's absolutely terrible at innovating and improving the quality of that thing. Because without a profit motivation, there's no reason to make things better. That's just an additional cost, and when you have no profit to cover for it, that's always just a negative. It's just a really bad way to do things and should be limited to just those things which only government can do (like military, police, etc).

Fine for you, you mean. (That's only touching on distribution and ignores issues like cheap additives to 'bulk' up food, the tons of salt and sugar added to food, deceptive labeling, issues with agricultural patents, so on and so forth)

Obviously.

To be fair, maybe you're against patent and copyright law. Although most pro-business people aren't and I suspect that you're not either.


BBC seems to do okay for itself, including selling its programming globally and having worldwide renown in comedy, drama, children's programming, science fiction and documentary programming. They even manage to have more than one station. This is, of course, politely ignoring the fact that 95% of current television programming already sucks anyway.

Edited, Sep 20th 2016 8:37am by Jophiel

Except education and health care are required at a high standard. Companies cut corners to gain those efficiencies you talk about and health care and education are not places you should be cutting corners. There is no place for private business in a market where supply IS the demand, everyone needs health care they don't choose it, they need it and they need a specific "it" at any given time unlike food which is full of choice. Don't like the price of apples, buy the oranges, don't like price of MRIs die of a brain tumor..it's a different kind of necessity, you can charge whatever you want for an MRI, I'm going to pay it because I don't want to die, you don't have flavours of MRI there's no choice there you're taking the first one that comes along, every time. That is why health care should be publicly funded, it's bunch of specific procedures you WILL pay for regardless of how fair the pricing is so it may as well just be a communal costs for everyone with little profit motive.

Seems like companies used to build things (speaking of TVs) to be of better quality than the competition in order to, you know, compete. These days it's a race to see who can build things as cheaply as possible, and if they crap out or fall apart after a week of use, oh well-- the consumers will just buy more. Just hire slaves in China to build everything out of cardboard and plastic and sell it all for a premium at a big box store full of miserable employees. It's standard and everyone is doing it so you don't have to worry about competition selling a superior product lest their target demographic are a bunch of hipsters who want to pay $1500 more for something questionably better.

Edited, Sep 20th 2016 5:53pm by Kuwoobie

Link it to retirement age and we can fix the solvency issues with social security too. Two birds with one stone and stuff.


Edited, Sep 20th 2016 11:35am by someproteinguy

No, it's cultural. We're more afraid of death as a whole, and less able to deal with it. Just quick links that have been here before:

http://time.com/money/2793643/cutting-the-high-cost-of-end-of-life-care/
http://www.oftwominds.com/photos2015/healthcare-by-age1.jpg

Or if you'd like there's an economic side to it too, you can blame the 1% for diving up costs:

http://theincidentaleconomist.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/ScreenHunter_01-Nov.-30-14.43-500x371.gif

Because they're going to use the funds if they're available of course. When you only have a limited number of treatment centers & doctors, the better ones go to the highest bidder.

Then you have 30 more years to reap the benefits of the costs at least. I'm (without wanting to pry into someone else's medical issues, of course) assuming the information you gained from the MRI/CAT scans was essential in choosing treatment options and not just a "yup you look good" kind of thing.

On the contrary we should be doing that anyway. Again this is part of the problem, you have to ask yourself if it's worth the money to roll the dice and try and save yourself. Those expenses end up being a burden on other loved ones in the short term and indirectly drive up medical costs for everyone (again, there's a limited number of doctors, etc). I mean, in the mid-30s it's not really an issue so much, the balance is much closer to the "spend the money" side of the equation, but when you're 72 and retired it's a serious consideration.


Edited, Sep 20th 2016 12:57pm by someproteinguy