Just because you wouldn't personally enjoy that life doesn't make it inherently wrong. Perhaps he enjoys his work and the people he works with, and finds his start up work at night very fulfilling who are you or I to decide that he is wrong or missing out?
I would love a tool that would let me set a breakpoint on an element and then show me a stack trace any time that element is modified. This would make locating a broken piece of JS in an unfamiliar code base so much easier.
I wont respond to the rest of your response, but it has been pretty clearly demonstrated by people smarter than you or I (at least in their respective professions) that free markets aren't always the most efficient solution to a problem, particularly when the desired solution is not just to come up with a price that is profitable for for the seller.
What has been clearly demonstrated is that free markets don't always reach the optimal solution. That is not the same as saying that governments can do better. In cases where there are market failures and/or externalities, very often there is no way to get to the optimal solution.
The real question is, which has worse failure modes, free markets or governments? I'm going to go with governments on that one.
I guess I would disagree with you on that. Given that the U.S. is basically the only first world country that still has private healthcare and it is typically rated somewhere between 15 and 40 world wide on most healthcare metrics, it seems like a number of countries have figured out a way to do public healthcare better... (and more cheaply)
But the real point is that all of those numbers have been increasing over time, and will continue to increase until the governments and countries collapse under the deadweight costs of centralized control. And on the way, we get to have laws bought by special interests and government regulations written by the companies that are supposed to be regulated.
I don't see any facts supporting your assertion that the countries will spontaneously collapse due to the size or spending of their governments... What I do see are a long list of countries with higher tax rates, budget surpluses or much smaller deficits than the USA, and much higher ranked healthcare systems (You point at Greece, I will point at Germany, Norway and Sweden. Let's just get that out of the way).
Let's leave it at this, I am not going to say that a public healthcare system (or a single payer system) is the only right way of doing things. What I will say is there are a lot of other countries out there that are able to provide a better health care system through that route while still remaining financially stable.
Maybe that is just not something that is in the cards for the USA though, maybe the trade off is that you have lower taxes, but a lower life expectancy if you are not wealthy.
I certainly am not going to pretend to know all the answers, but I do think refusing to learn from other countries because they are not doing it the "American" way (read: with a free market) would be a silly reason to accept having one of the worst healthcare systems in the first world.
I don't see any facts supporting your assertion that the countries will spontaneously collapse due to the size or spending of their governments...
Soviet Union.
they are not doing it the "American" way (read: with a free market)
The US does not have a free market in health care, and hasn't since at least World War II, when employers started providing health benefits to attract workers because they were unable to offer higher wages (wages were regulated by the government during the war). A free market would mean everyone sees all of the costs of the health care they receive, and weighs the costs against the expected benefits, and only buys health care for which the expected benefits exceed the costs. Nobody that participates in employer-provided health care (which is most workers in the US) does that; the only costs they see are their portion of the premiums and their copays, so they want whatever health care has a benefit to them that exceeds those costs.
The provider side of the US health care system is not a free market either; a person can't just decide to be a provider. Doctors, nurses, x-ray technicians, etc., etc., all have to be licensed by the government. That is supposed to help guarantee that they are competent, but it also helps to keep costs higher by restricting the supply of providers. (To some extent there are now private clinics trying to end-run around this for basic services like blood pressure or cholesterol screening; but they are limited, and mostly serve people who don't have employer-provided insurance.)
In short, the US health care system is not an example of a free market system that achieves less optimal outcomes than a government system; it's an example of a bastardized part-government part-private system that achieves less optimal outcomes (by some metrics--by others, for example wait times for critical surgeries, it achieves better outcomes) than a government system.
Ahh, "Soviet Union", the answer to every question about the evils of government. I take it that means you don't really want to discuss that point, as "Soviet Union" is hardly and answer, and as I pointed out nearly every other first world country has a "larger" government that the USA, and they are almost all in better financial shape too.
But we have come full circle, and as I mentioned in my first response free markets are not meant to create a solution for problems whose success is not defined by finding the "fair price" for something. In my books, solution that prevents people from being able to obtain/afford healthcare (and lets be clear, no matter how many "inefficiencies" you might eliminate through deregulation, there will always be a segment of the population that cannot afford to pay for healthcare, just like they cannot afford to pay for housing or food) will never be a success.
But this is all a moot discussion. The likelihood of the United States moving further to the left on healthcare is exponentially higher than the likelihood of the industry being deregulated to the point where you scenario starts to be able to realize real benefits. As-such, if a true "free market" healthcare system is not politically palatable for the country, then I think both of us, and the facts, are all in agreement that a single payer or public system would do a much better job than our current "bastardized part-government part-private" system.
You're probably right that a true free market health care system is not politically palatable, just like a true free market in any aspect of the economy is not politically palatable. That doesn't mean free markets don't work; it means they're not tried.
free markets are not meant to create a solution for problems whose success is not defined by finding the "fair price" for something
Your definition of a free market is too narrow. Free markets are applicable in any situation where there are scarce resources that need to be allocated. There may not be a "fair" price for health care, but it is certainly a scarce resource that needs to be allocated. There isn't a "fair" price for groceries, computers, etc., but the free market allocates them.
Sure it is. Consider: it took the Soviet Union more than 70 years to collapse. Someone who looked at the economic numbers of the Soviet Union in the 1920's, or even in the 1930's, might well have thought they were doing great. But they were trying to centrally manage something that's too complex and diverse to be centrally managed, and it caught up with them. Other countries are trying to do the same thing, and it's going to catch up with them as well. Or perhaps I should say "us" since I live in one of the countries (the US) that's doing this.
I think those are an interesting set of questions, but for the most part easily answered by "What does the law currently say?"
- Public health care has absolutely no say on the speed with which a doctor can decide whether life saving surgery is required. In fact I would imagine that knowing that the surgery will be paid for regardless of whether the patient has a job or not might make this decision faster.
- The government pays for top end mathematical talent in other sectors (security) so it stands to reason that if it were necessary, they could in health care as well. Again though, removing the private insurance part of the equation would probably remove the need.
- Obviously yes, just like any other person who requires surgery to live.
- Again, obviously yes. Current laws allowing abortions make this a non-issue. I understand some people are morally or religiously opposed to abortion, but we are governed by the laws of the society we live in. If that is a problem the answer is to change those laws, not to ignore them.
-There are any number of taxing schemes that could subsidize public healthcare but I have never seen one that introduced a progressive tax based on health history (kinda defeats the point?). I would imagine that if the majority of the other countries in the first world can figure this one out, the US probably could too.
I think questions like these are intentionally meant to bring up emotional responses and generate controversy around what could be a really simple decision (either way).
I'm really not meaning to bring up "emotional responses", I'm merely trying to give some people with different opinions a voice.
Also, you seem to think I'm advocating we do not perform life-threatening procedures, which I'm not. I'm questioning who pays for them. Does the public, including those who find abortion morally reprehensible, pay for those abortions? Does the public pay for a liposuction that could have been avoided with diet and exercise?
People seem to forget that this isn't a question of doing procedures or not, this is about who foots the bill for that procedure.
> Does the public pay for a liposuction that could have been avoided with diet and exercise?
Does the public pay for emergency treatment of someone who's in a car accident because they were driving drunk? Right now we do, directly or indirectly. If someone doesn't have insurance, emergency care is still performed without regard to whether it's the recipient's fault that they need it. If they can't pay the bill it is passed along to other patients in the form of higher prices.
> Does the public, including those who find abortion morally reprehensible, pay for those abortions?
Right now the public, including those who find war morally reprehensible, are forced to pay for wars. I think the anti-abortionists can manage. If you find it morally reprehensible to perform an abortion to save the mother's life, then if you are ever in the situation where you'll die if you don't get an abortion, you are free to refuse the procedure. Your personal moral code does not give you the right to choose whether strangers live or die.
I don't think you are advocating anything, so there is nothing personal here, just for the record.
I think that we need to divorce ourselves from the specific procedures, and just talk about life saving health care. If we were to adopt public healthcare, the public would pay for life saving health care that is legally allowed. Then we can apply that framework to specific procedures, which for both your examples means yes, it would be done.
You would not be paying specifically for the girl down the street to have an abortion. You would be paying your taxes, some small part of which may be applied to save her life in the event it is necessary, using whatever legal procedures are required.
While you are right, that this is in part about who foots the bill, the other thing it is about is helping people live healthy lives without going bankrupt, which is a uniquely American problem in the first world.
At the end of the day it was not google who is making this choice but Facebook. There is still a functioning API that would allow Facebook to continue allowing users to import their contacts. The problem is that they are no longer in compliance with the usage terms of this API. If it is such a problem for the customer all Facebook needs to do is move into compliance with the usage terms of this API (by allowing users to export their data from facebook) and then they can begin using the API again.
All in all I agree with Google's modification to the API usage license and really think that the ball is in Facebook's court.
