WAKE UP WOKE PEOPLE!

[TheEncogitationerParticipant]

Robert,

Impressive equation. Now is there an Engineering principle that says that all of us should be governed by what the most stupid and evil of us may do?

[UnseenParticipant]

@Enco

A colonoscopy isn’t a scarce life-saving organ, although in our crazy health care system, you probably won’t get one, even if you should need one, unless you can pony up the money to pay for it, Hippcratic Oath be damned.

So, my teenage boy and my widowed mother of three probably won’t be able to outbid the successful elderly attorney and that suits you just fine, I guess(?).

Don’t fool yourself that vat-grown organs would be cheap even if the cost of manufacture was low. Look at how much Big Pharma gets for simple insulin, a hormone that should have been generic long ago. When something has potential as a cash cow, they’ll milk it for all it’s worth.

 

[TheEncogitationerParticipant]

Davis,

Yeah, in Europe we have had no free plastic bags for nearly a decade now and most countries have or are banning single use plastic bags. The UK is behind on this, of course, now that it has left the EU, it has the “autonomy” and “freedom” to pollute at whatever rate is economically viable while public opinion eventually demands environmental protection. Spain and Belgium mostly does reusable bags and easily recyclable paper bags.

Belgium has the best recycling program I know. You pay for specific coloured garbage bags. They are NOT collected (as they are transparant) unless sorted correctly. green=organic, Pink=plastic, blue=metal/containers, black=paper (glass is put in a common hop on many street corners) and brown for all else. Brown bags are very small and cost €1.50, so not sorting your recycling becomes QUITE expensive quite quickly. Even more so, if you don’t include coloured bags along with the brown ones, they will not be picked up. Green bags cost only 5 cents. If you put normal rubbish in a green bag (and they will check through the transparent bags) NOTHING will be collected. Collection is weekly, so that will get very smelly in the summer. Due to this, everyone is responsible and careful (it is not hard to do) and this is cost effective, uncontroversial and people habitually and responsibly recycle (properly sorting). I remember talking with two Americans who were outraged by all of this for two different reasons.

Well, there’s your trouble. You guys have made this into work. Unpaid work. Forced unpaid work. Small wonder there’s buck-up against it.

Americans have no problem whatsoever with recycling Aluminum, Steel, and glass, precisely because these are easy to to reuse in the case of auto or machine parts or to smelt down and reshape as a last resort…and it all pays! Charities frequently ask for and accept vehicles in any condition so they can resell to recyclers for proceeds.

As for plastic and paper, it’s easier and cheaper to reuse than to recycle. At least paper can be and is used to make compost and plastic bags are of better use as knitted mats than smelted into recycled plastic bags.

By the way, the only reason there is a plastic bag problem is because 40 years ago, environmentalists proposed plastic bags as an “Earth-friendly” alternative to cutting down trees to make paper bags and as a way to save the “untouched, pristine, and virginal” Amazon Rainforest. I was a grocery bagger at the time so I was there when the change in bags happened.

Well, it turns out that was never needed. Paper companies such as Georgia-Pacific devote some of their forest land for paper production while devoting other forest lands to tree growth, then switch uses when land used for paper has been cleared out and the land used for tree growth has trees the right size to replenish paper production. They get this whole “Circle of Life” thing.

Also, the “untouched, pristine, virginal” Amazon Rainforest is not so much after all, since archeologists and anthropologists have found that several civilizations have been there at least a few thousand years ago:

Was the Amazon Rainforest Once Home to A Massive Lost Civilization?
https://www.ancient-origins.net/ancient-places-americas/was-amazon-rainforest-once-home-massive-lost-civilization-008342

Legitimate solutions to resource problems are found in the acts of individuals seeking betterment in a free marketplace. Everything else is just “solutions” looking for a problem.

[jakelafortParticipant]

IDEOENCO speaks: Would anybody ask such questions about who gets apartments or plumbing or McDonald’s Hamburgers? Do any such commodities or services have a board to make decisions on who gets what and when?

Apartments? Ever hear of section 8? Of rent control?

I can well imagine your defense of slavery. Commodities. Free market.

If not, why not? Lets suppose the USA today is ante bellum South. No bill of rights or other protections for slaves. Why interfere with THAT free market?

[_Robert_Participant]

Unseen wrote:

@Enco A colonoscopy isn’t a scarce life-saving organ, although in our crazy health care system, you probably won’t get one, even if you should need one, unless you can pony up the money to pay for it, Hippcratic Oath be damned.

If you have Obamacare (Affordable Care Act) or Medicare insurance, these screenings are covered (no out-of-pocket costs for patients, such as co-pays or deductibles) by law.

https://www.cancer.org/cancer/colon-rectal-cancer/detection-diagnosis-staging/screening-coverage-laws.html

Any decent employee plan will cover all sorts of screenings as well. Less than 10% of Americans have no health coverage yet many of that 90% who are, will get the bad news some day.

[UnseenParticipant]

@robert

There’s little comparison between a screening exam like a colonoscopy or a blood panel and someone whose life is hanging on by a thread while they wish and hope a kidney, liver, or heart will become available before the cascade of organ failures that will end their life begins.

[_Robert_Participant]

Unseen wrote:

@robert There’s little comparison between a screening exam like a colonoscopy or a blood panel and someone whose life is hanging on by a thread while they wish and hope a kidney, liver, or heart will become available before the cascade of organ failures that will end their life begins.

That’s true of course, yet in so many of those cases the desperate condition got to that point because the patient neglected the common advice to get the screening available for no cost. And/or voted for republican assholes who don’t give a fuck when and if you croak because it’s all just business.

[TheEncogitationerParticipant]

Unseen,

A colonoscopy isn’t a scarce life-saving organ, although in our crazy health care system, you probably won’t get one, even if you should need one, unless you can pony up the money to pay for it, Hippcratic Oath be damned.

So Doctors and donors should be rightless slaves over an Oath that was made to non-existent Greek Gods, an Oath which originally forbade abortion and assisted suicide, an Oath which has been edited over the years, and which was never unanimously supported even when it began?

So, my teenage boy and my widowed mother of three probably won’t be able to outbid the successful elderly attorney and that suits you just fine, I guess(?).

Don’t you get it? If organs and tissues were sellable or vat-grown, they would be practically overflowing the cryonic storage and people wouldn’t have to “bid” on organs and tissues at auction, any more than they “bid” upon a bag of frozen vegetables. (Sorry if anyone is eating.)

Don’t fool yourself that vat-grown organs would be cheap even if the cost of manufacture was low. Look at how much Big Pharma gets for simple insulin, a hormone that should have been generic long ago. When something has potential as a cash cow, they’ll milk it for all it’s worth.

So why isn’t every good or service like that even when inflation is low? Why don’t all prices go to infinity at a manufacturer’s mere whim? Prices simply don’t work like that. The Law of Supply and Demand is not to be denied except at peril.

Prices go up faster than inflation for health care because third-party public or private insurers pay the bill of the freight and there is less incentive for health care providers to hold own costs.

With third-party insurers out of the picture, health care providers would be subject to the same market pressure to hold down costs and add value as any other good or service provider. And when combined with ubiquitous all-you-can-use organs and tissues, prices would be even lower.

[TheEncogitationerParticipant]

Jake,

Apartments? Ever hear of section 8?

Yes. Section 8 apartments are not shelter. They are low-rent war zones.

Every apartment I’ve ever seen that excepts Section 8 vouchers immediately draws criminals, gangs, scofflaws, and freeloaders, has revolving-door management and maintenance, gets overgrown shrubbery and grass, has falling-apart facilities, and eventually becomes unfit habitation for man or beast.

Of rent control?

Yes. Rent control gives landlords less capital or incentive to maintain apartments and it gives land owners and construction firms less incentive to build new apartments. Even Socialists like Gunnar Myrdal, Assar Lindbeck, and Vietnam’s Foreign Minister Nguyễn Cơ Thạch described rent control as second only to aerial bombing as a destroyer of cities.

Only bombing would be worse than rent control Sam Bowman
https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/planning-transport/only-bombing-would-be-worse-than-rent-control

I can well imagine your defense of slavery. Commodities. Free market.

If not, why not? Lets suppose the USA today is ante bellum South. No bill of rights or other protections for slaves. Why interfere with THAT free market?

Until you learn the precise definition of terms and stop applying them to everything like a 3-year-old, this dialogue on Free-Market Capitalism will have to be indefinitely postponed.

[jakelafortParticipant]

Ideoenco: You asked whether anybody asks questions about who gets apartments. I illustrated that YES in certain cases it happens. I have gone to parties in section 8 housing in Hartford. Perfectly well maintained and orderly too…

And i am not surprised you dodged the issue i presented that challenges your ideology. Just like you did in the past-you are an intellectual coward.

[TheEncogitationerParticipant]

Jake,

Ideoenco: You asked whether anybody asks questions about who gets apartments.

No one asks questions about life goals or life prospects of potential tenents, as they did of organ recipients in Unsern’s scenario. All landlords are concerned about is whether the potential tenent is of good character and will pay the rent and utilities when due.

And i am not surprised you dodged the issue i presented that challenges your ideology. Just like you did in the past-you are an intellectual coward.

I don’t grant the premise of your questions that slavery is a Free-Market Capitalist venture. It’s not cowardice to not argue from a false premise.

Free-Market Capitalism means the individual right to private ownership of one’s property, which includes one’s mind, body, labor and all fruits of those and the right to freely produce and exchange those fruits with other individuals.

Slavery is an obvious negation of that individual property right and thus is not Free-Market Capitalism. Adam Smith didn’t support it. Frederic Bastiat didn’t support it. Ludwig Von Mises and Friedrich Von Hayek didn’t support it. Milton Friedman didn’t support it. Walter E. Williams damn sure didn’t support it and Thomas Sowell damn sure doesn’t support it now.

• This reply was modified 4 months ago by  TheEncogitationer. Reason: Word addendum
• This reply was modified 4 months ago by  TheEncogitationer. Reason: Misspelled "Frederic"

[PopeBeanieModerator]

TheEncogitationer wrote:

Every apartment I’ve ever seen that excepts Section 8 vouchers immediately draws criminals, gangs, scofflaws, and freeloaders, has revolving-door management and maintenance, gets overgrown shrubbery and grass, has falling-apart facilities, and eventually becomes unfit habitation for man or beast.

Maybe you’ve just not made friends with Section 8 “kind of people”, or veterans? Granted, my list of those kinds of people that I know is only ex-homeless veterans so far, but they don’t fit the description you successfully work to maintain in your head. In fact, one of my best friends, homeless while fresh out of prison for robbery to support his heroin addiction 1) was given shelter by a charitable organization (which is where we met); 2) kept clean and attained a drug and alcohol counseling certificate during Obama’s homeless vet vocational training initiative; 3) got a Section 8 housing voucher and was later hired as a counselor by the VA; 4) has been living for years now on his own income (weaned off Section 8) as a successful counselor.

As I’ve mentioned before, one awesome example of socialized medicine working in USA is paid for by the VA, and it’s so unfortunate and costly to USA in the long run to not care enough about its other citizens to invest in their physical and mental well being. Of course the stereotype that you maintain is largely valid, but it isn’t proof that socialized care can’t work, and my vet friend is not the only example of success that I’m personally am aware of.

[Of rent control?] Yes. Rent control gives landlords less capital or incentive to maintain apartments and it gives land owners and construction firms less incentive to build new apartments. Even Socialists like Gunnar Myrdal, Assar Lindbeck, and Vietnam’s Foreign Minister Nguyễn Cơ Thạch described rent control as second only to aerial bombing as a destroyer of cities.

The “Even socialists like… [insert Joe Blows]” anecdote sounds like mere confirmation-bias to me, in the big picture. Back to my example of the VA’s socialized care model, I know at least one landlord/owner who has bought into the long term track record of having Section 8 tenants, or at least tenants funded by the VA’s “HUD-VASH” program that funds Section 8 administrated by the city. I’m not saying that the VA’s model is inexpensive in the short term, but its long-term success certainly contradicts the USA’s political and financial powers’ intractable ideological insistence that only short-term (e.g. quarterly) free enterprise profit models and investments should be enough to improve the long-term public health of a nation. It is a narrowly focused ideology, like one of the ten commandments, where perfect is the enemy of good and any deviation from the idealism is a sin by definition. (Wait, is that a wokeness-like conviction?!)

[jakelafortParticipant]

Enco, thank you for at least attempting to answer. Even so you have skirted the issue.

Free market capitalism was all the fuck over slavery. It was good business. That is what happened when the market was FREE!
You don’t like the idea of slavery. Nor do the figured you’ve cited. Who gives a flying fuck if you like or dislike slavery. You have to live with your ideology. Free markets create all kinds of abuse. Slave labor. Child labor. And an entire economy that was founded on slavery. Some regulation and judgment must be injected to avoid the worst outcomes.

It is axiomatic that the accumulation of power results in abuse. Autocrats, businesses, churches…whatever. Systems that fail to acknowledge and check the natural result of human nature are terribly flawed.

Furthermore when all of your analysis is through the prism of libertarianism or any other ism or BS belief you are not really thinking because you are required to assume the truth of the matter asserted; all of its precepts hook line and sinker. Therefore you are incapable of even the appearance of detached analysis.

[Reg the Fronkey FarmerModerator]

@popebeanie – It is a narrowly focused ideology, like one of the ten commandments, where perfect is the enemy of good and any deviation from the idealism is a sin by definition. (Wait, is that a wokeness-like conviction?!)

No, it is not but it is a very good one line summary.

[UnseenParticipant]

@Enco

If being a slave to price and distribution control of organs strips doctors of their rights and turns them into slaves, then so does having to function in a fierce competition with other doctors.

But what is the goal of the health care system in your world. I gather it it’s to enrich doctors and not too humanely provide lifesaving care to people who need it as rationally as possible.

[Author]

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