I was hanging out with my pharmacist friend and he mentioned that a decade his friend invited him to go into business opening up a pain clinic but it was pretty obvious it was a pill mill and he told his friend no thanks. His friend went on to make multiple millions of dollars very quickly and will never face consequences.
It got me thinking that there were probably tens of thousands of people who each made millions of dollars knowing full well what they were doing was killing people and they will never face any consequences for their actions.
Consequences are only for Julian Assange and Snowden.
The mil complex, pill complex, big tech-advertistng-attention capture complex, wall street market manipulation crypto bs complex have all gotten away with taking advantage of the weakness in the population, exploiting the bottom of the food chain at scale, for so long that there is no fear at all.
I really don't know how the situation is going to change in the US..
Things can change though. For decades rich disgusting guys were abusing young girls and women, without repurcussions, until the #metoo movement sent the Weinsteins, the R‘Kellys, the Epsteins and their helpers and others to jail.
Those are all limited hang outs. Abuse is endemic in Hollywood, Weinstein and Bill Cosby were scapegoats. I’m sure things have continued as they did before a few people went to jail.
Similarly with Epstein. Prince Andrew, Bill Clinton, Trump, Gates. None of them will ever face consequences.
If this is how we decided it is, they will not. Sadly an awful lot of people already decided that this is an unchangable law of nature — and by doing so they are complicit.
IF things change, which clients of convicted sex trafficker Maxwell we’re also charged and convicted after being named in the public courtroom that the world is watching instead of celebrity court?
>I really don't know how the situation is going to change in the US..
As an Aussie, I've always found this strange.
You've got the second amendment.
At any point in time, you've got hundreds of thousands of people with a shed full of assault rifles and a prognosis that gives them less than 6 months to live.
Yet rather than going after Wall Street or Big Pharma, every single violent rampage seems to target school kids or just random members of the public.
They're civilized, normal, rational people - guess they don't see violence as a solution. Not like those mentally unstable, radicalized and frequently immature shooters.
I don't think "the government" is /just/ a set of people that changes over time. Government, based on the people who were previously in it and incentive structures, change/enable the people who are in the government to varying degrees.
> government is just a set of people that changes over time
Then use the 2nd amendment , until rational people enter the scene
> “In politics, my dear fellow, you know, as well as I do, there are no men, but ideas — no feelings, but interests; in politics we do not kill a man, we only remove an obstacle, that is all.”
― Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo
No revenge. Turns out people capable of killing either are already part of Police force, and/or are too insane to think logically and lash out at innocents.
I always thought if I was about to die in poverty due to the state of our screwed up "health care" system I'd self immolate on the steps of a health insurer's CEO or corporate headquarters.
I haven't heard of any medical related ones, but there have been cases where an adult shot their boss, or a judge that had ruled against them or a cop that had arrested them. These just don't get the press coverage, for whatever reason.
Yea and the government made of US citizens. Have you really forgotten about the polarization of the US or are you just going to treat the 300M+ people as one homogeneous group?
Open a history book. Two important events you’ll find:
- the US government trying to use military against citizens resulted in a civil war and military fighting military.
- the Iraq, Afghanistan, and Vietnam wars have demonstrated quite clearly that armed insurgents cannot be eradicated by a massive power imbalance alone. People making IEDs out of stuff you can find at a Home Depot and randomly attacking military from within civilian populations using small arms was significantly effective.
“But muh gubment has fancy planes so people shouldn’t have guns” is about the dumbest argument you can make.
See, my point was that the government has been growing increasingly tyrannical and a good portion of the population has gone along with it whole-hog
Police have been increasingly militarized and its used against citizens on a regular basis
Which portion of the population felates the police on a regular basis and says they can do no wrong? The boot has been licked, brother. You can thank hyper nationalism
Several mass shooter manifestos have made references to the parties you’re talking about… but they end up killing their families, school children, or shopping centers full of minorities instead.
I suspect it’s because most mass shooters are ultimately cowards and those organizations are big, scary, and often located in “intimidating” areas like major cities. That, and there’s tons of racist conspiracy theories that make it sound like a bunch of working class Muslims, Blacks and Latinos are somehow playing for the same team as Jamie Dimon.
The fantasy and education of "individual values" as well as "superhero" pretty much proofs the mind of US people to work on meaningful organized resistance.
Going off the topic a bit- I was recently listening to an American podcast and it was talking about a single mother who worked multiple jobs finally getting a good full time job who said that they would visit the doctor even though they aren't sick "just because they can", and this made me, a non American, tear up. how could people in the developed world, even poor people, not have access to healthcare, when even our government with a fraction of the US govt budget provides free basic Healthcare and people are generally able to see doctors.. seems like a very strange thing right? has the word "developed" lost all meaning? or is the US not a developed country anymore?
I saw a Tweet to the effect of "Instead of thinking of the US as a version of Norway or the Netherlands that happens to be failing on virtually every metric, it's more accurate to think of the US as a version of Brazil that happens to be rich."
would be very interesting to see what metrics one can use to visualise this sentiment, and if it's true or not (my feeling is it's true). imo metrics like GDP, healthy birth, education etc provide a distorted and inaccurate view of citizen welfare. to have a good society, we need to choose metrics that will rank a perfect utopia better than a dystopia (which we don't have, a slave state will have higher GDP, cuz, well, slaves) . but ofc, everyone can't agree on what utopia looks like, so how do you get the metrics? maybe by agreeing on some basic ground rules (slavery bad, murder bad, work-life balance good etc) and build metrics based on these. ofc now no one will agree on the ground rules, but I suppose it's the elected governments job to decide those based on the specific culture of a country. ofc this is a very simplified view of reality and will fall apart in mere minutes in the real world, but kight serve as a starting point, no?
This is the correct approach, but I think the real answer is "a version of Brazil that fully capitalized on European wobbles in the first half of the XX century". The US effectively conquered Europe in WW2, hence acquiring complete leadership of the rich world.
I’ve had the same thought before - America does a great job within its population bracket, but it doesn’t make sense at all comparing us to, say, a Switzerland or a New Zealand.
Switzerland has what may be one of the more comparable health insurance systems to that in the US. I definitely thought twice or three times before contacting a doctor (and ended up not doing so), and somewhat regretted an ambulance being called for me due to the ensuing bill.
Going further off topic, inspired by the US single mother story. There's a joke in Japan about a group of old people sitting in the waiting room at a doctors office. One of them asks, "Hey, where's Tanaka-san?" Another one answers, "She couldn't make it. She's sick."
I blame WWII, and the idiots we had in Congress at the time. Before WWII, health care was super cheap. It was so inexpensive that nobody budgeted for it, or considered how they would ever pay for it. Health insurance technically existed, but it was rarely used; most people would never have high medical bills, so most people saw no advantage in paying a monthly fee for the insurance instead of just paying for the health care as they needed it.
During WWII, Congress wanted to be seen to help the war effort, so they started passing bills. Some of those were ok, some were terrible. The worst were the price and wage controls. Price controls create shortages, and wage controls create shortages of workers. Since the supply of employees went down drastically (with so many people going into the military), naturally wages had to rise. But once wage controls were in place, employers could not offer more money. The best that they could do was to offer perks instead. Waiters started asking for tips. White–collar employers started offering free health insurance and other perks. Others offered free housing, and even whole company towns. Pensions are another good example. By the time the war ended, these and other perks were rapidly becoming ubiquitous.
Free housing and company towns were too easily abused, so in the 50s those were gradually done away with. You can read about the problems with tipping elsewhere.
Ever since the end of WWII, the cost of healthcare has risen steadily. (So did the quality of the care, of course.) People no longer pay for health care as they need it. They no longer shop around for the best prices, even for predictable expenses such as childbirth. Most hospitals won’t even tell you what their prices are, even though they are now technically required to maintain a webpage with that information. (Most primary care physicians are much more reasonable about such things, but even they might not know ahead of time what everything will cost, since it might depend on what insurance you have.)
It’s pretty easy to see why prices are rising. People pay thousands of dollars per year for insurance, whether they need any health care or not. Nobody knows exactly what anything will actually cost until afterwards, when they are arguing with their insurance company about it.
In fact, prices are so opaque that hundreds or thousands of people every year make simple mistakes that cost them tens of thousands of dollars. There are as many sob stories as you care to listen to from people who went to a hospital with an injury that wasn’t immediately life threatening and were billed some outrageous amount. They could have gone to their normal doctor to have their broken bone set for a couple hundred dollars, but they instead have to pay thousands for the ambulance ride, thousands for the hospital bed, thousands for consultations with doctors whose names they don’t remember, etc.
Now it is true that in situations like this it is difficult to go back in time and replay history with different choices, so I admit that this is not all as obvious to people as I make it sound. There is plenty of scope for disagreement about causes and effects.
However, there is another source of evidence. Instead of going back in time and making different choices, we could do an A–B test. Have one group of people go with ubiquitous health insurance and another group avoid it, then compare the outcomes. You might think that this would be hard to arrange, but it actually happened! The Amish arranged their own lives to avoid most of the complications of modern life and high technology, and apparently that includes insurance as well. As I understand it, their health care is still very inexpensive; they haven’t had the same continual rise in prices that the rest of us have had.
How effective was medicine before WWII? How complex was it? How many instruments for extensive tests were there? Labs that would run analysis to find out what is wrong with you so that doctors could figure out how to best cure you?
Sure, the current system is preposterous and prices are way higher that necessary, but we can't just compare with the past unless you also want a service like the one you'd got in the past, which is probably still quite affordable.
You don't need to compare with the past. Just compare with other countries, where you can pay 300 a month and have all your family fully covered privately. No copay. No public health. Although you can skip the payment and get public health. Or even have both and decide when to go private and when public. All in much less powerful economies.
I think OP was pointing to a potential starting point of the raise in prices and decoupling it from the actual services rendered. Something I think is very likely given that now there are a lot of examples where things are comparable quality with much lower prices. It might not be exactly WWII, but it certainly was caused by some factors not tied directly to the quality of the services.
Right, I never tried to say that there was only one cause for prices going up. However, note that technology has vastly decreased costs across all industries too. Faster communications, faster billing and payments, digital images instead of film that has to be developed, etc, etc. It’s not immediately obvious that the rising quality of healthcare would necessarily make it more expensive, given the vast cost reductions happening at the same time.
Technology has vastly decreased the cost of things that existed.
Technology also vastly increased the cost of things that didn't exist.
Prior to the invention of video games, nobody spent a dime on video games. People today spend a lot of money in air travel while before WWII very few people spent money on air travel. Etc
Developed never really has the meaning that you think it has, imho. In Europe, during a long time, it really meant "like us" without thinking that each European country have a lot of different country. Looks at the difference in the Health system between Belgium and the Nederlands.
Actually the terminology shifted in some organizations as a continum of Low to High income countries (set by the World Bank). It is far from perfect but it frames the differences and terminology differently in your mind.
If our male breast cancer rate was as out-of-wack with the rate of the same cancer in other developed countries we absolutely would have people talking about it, like we have with the “obesity” epidemic or other issues that seem correlated with being an american.
Why do you think that level of development is a relevant criteria? The homicide rate in Bangladesh is 2.37 per 100,000. The homicide rate in Puerto Rico is 18.5 per 100,000. Both have very strict gun control and the populations are virtually disarmed. Indeed, the US has always had vastly higher homicide rates than Europe, long before modern gun control.
Compared to other countries in the Americas, however, the US homicide rate doesn’t seem that high.
Sure, even if homicide rates == mass shootings, that’s still worth talking about why they are different in the Americas than developed European countries? Any major negative difference from a peer country is discussion worthy. Note I am not arguing for a specific remedy, I am arguing that this issue isn’t overblown relative to rates of male breast cancer or whatever else due to the absolute number of deaths, but because the difference in the number of deaths per capita suggests possible known solutions worth considering the trade-offs of.
I think you've missed gp's point of comparison, as well as misunderstood the logical notions of necessity and sufficiency. If the murder rate in place X is lower than in places Y and Z, both of which have (a) disarmed their people and (b) have whatever undefined things "going badly," then it is logical to assume that neither (a) nor (b) is logically necessary or sufficient for a lower murder rate. The comparison suggests that disarmament and having things "go badly," whatever that means, are not causally related to a lower murder rate.
expect that's not true because homicide rates don't exist in a vacuum. there's factors like education, poverty, drug use, gangs etc at play and you really can't compare two very big and very different countries with vastly different cultures, temperaments and conditions. its an oversimplification of the world we live in and imo it's better to admit that we don't know.
OP argued guns are responsible for high US homicide rates by attempting to rule out another salient difference, namely economic development.
But it’s wrong to assume that economic development is the only, or even a particularly salient difference. Asia has much lower homicide rates than Latin America, despite Asia being poorer and both having strict gun control. Similarly, the US had ten times the homicide rate of the UK even in 1900, long before significant British gun control.
The point is that comparisons with Europe and Asia overlook that the US is more like Latin America in many regards, as a post-colonial, post-slavery, low-social-trust immigrant society, than it is like other “developed countries.”
Put differently, people wave away comparisons between the US and Latin America (which also has strict gun control) on the assumption that high homicides there are caused by poverty. But Latin America is mostly middle income countries. Yet their homicide rates are vastly higher than poorer Asian countries. (Puerto Rico has the same GDP per capita as Spain, is an island with strict gun control, and has a homicide rate ten times higher than Spain.)
Probably not true, but only just. 570 men die of breast cancer each year in the US (latest stats from the Cancer Statistics Center) while 330 people have died in mass shootings in the US this year so far. You can see the stats, taken from the Gun Violence Archive, here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1xB5VWgcpvw5UrWYq-6so...
Mass shootings are more traumatic though as they're extremely brutal, graphic, and sudden. I'd weight the actual impact of someone I know being shot in a mass shooting far worse than someone I know dying of breast cancer. The latter won't have them leave in the morning and not come back at 5pm randomly. It also won't create a general climate of fear, distrust between people, and terrible politics. Both are tragic, but tragedies of different kind, which is why direct comparisons always seem technically correct but missing so badly the way people actually think about and experience tragedy.
this makes no sense, because the reason US school shootings get press is because they are a. a very American phenomenon and b. easily stopped hy policy change. breast cancer can't be reduced by simply making cancer cells illegal, but shorting can stop by regulating guns. this is a very bad take on so many levels.
Laws have created an environment that makes it facially difficult to lay blame. Technology has made it easier and faster and safer to conspire. Police were created to catch slaves and they’re culturally incapable of doing any more than that. Imagine Joe average local cop trying to go undercover at McKinsey. Done laughing? What about the fbi you ask? They’re just as bad as local police but think and act like they’re better. Other regulatory agencies either have been entirely corrupted and co-opted or they’ve been neutered or will be soon by this law making body we formerly called the Supreme Court.
People crave Justice. Vigilantes do not create Justice. Thus harming people harming society without due process is unjust. The founding fathers and other visionaries like Malcolm X and MlK have written more on this topic but personally I find it a too boring to have read into. Look at the Arab spring for a recent successful reactionary rights movement that was not started by a massacre and look to China for the leading edge of suppressing dissent. The champions of advancing human rights are largely not cold blooded killers whereas those suppressing such movements must regress to these tactics to maintain their hard and soft power.
What’s with the value judgement? People who had accidents and get addicted to pain killers are “weak” and “at the bottom of the food chain”? And “food chain” implies that humans are supposed to prey on each other, which would make what those people are doing OK.
A better system than capitalism is a better capitalism.
Capitalism is not boolean. Anything can be good for the economy of somebody but we don't need to accept school mass shootings, or drug trafficking, or massive wildfires, or millions of people jailed for minor offenses, just because somebody benefits of it
> A better system than capitalism is a better capitalism.
Except that is never the conclusion of anyone that makes it a point to criticize how terrible everything is, without the context that everything is better today than it ever has been.
I think that's an extremely reductive and academically dishonest question.
Adam Smith didn't propose some new system (and nor did Marx, really). Modern economists understand at least they work based on observation of human behavior and policy to influence or react to it, not a "system" from first principles that solves all problems perfectly.
I don't think you read Marx, because what you're saying about his work ain't true: he absolutely had a systemic thinking and within it for sure perfection could be achieved, by means of superceding the division of classes. Nevertheless, most people who cite Marx didn't actually read Marx, but a rehashed version from someone else. Or perhaps only a small, incomplete, subset of his work, from a very specific perspective. Marx's writings in particular have been falsified many times, for a multitude of reasons.
Marx didn’t propose a new system of government though, Marx proposed a theory of history (“history as class struggle”) in which the inevitable outcome was communism.
How about actual capitalism rather than the government-enforced pro-major-corporations environment we have now? When businesses can lobby government to change the rules in their favor any sort of free market is impossible...
The only way to get Adam Smith style markets is to forbid, and enforce the prohibition, corporations that are a large fraction of the market. No Walmart, no Amazon, no Tesco, Sainsbury's, Morrisons, no IBM, no ARM, no Toyota, VW, or Ford.
Ownership structures that hide the actual owners would have to be rooted out.
That way we might get slightly closer to markets where both suppliers and customers have a choice as to who to deal with.
I know it feels very self-righteous to dunk on college students but this reasoning is kind of like traveling back to the middle ages and telling a knight "if you have a better system than feudalism, we're all ears".
Just like a King is going to do anything in their vast amount of power to uphold the monarchy; so does capitalism. In both cases, the current powers that be will always seem entrenched
Sure if you are so confident that the existing system is maximally good, you’d be interacting with professors of economics, history, and sociology, not college freshmen since a bunch of people 18 year olds aren’t exactly most equipped to answer these questions.
No. I am saying that complaining about "every college freshman who just took poli sci 101" is not an effective way of engaging in discussion about the merits of capitalism.
And assuming I am "confident that the existing system is maximally good" is equally as bad of footing to begin a discussion. I think nothing of the sort.
2. Yes revolution is bad, violent, and dark times in the short term. More of an argument to reform our current system rather than listen to romantic ideas of ditching capitalism as a whole.
You could make that same argument to the hypothetical knight. Capitalism in the modern sense has only been around for 200 years. Just because you are unable to imagine a different future doesn't mean that one doesn't exist. What you are doing is no different than an appeal to tradition. You are sacrificing the virgin to the mountain god every year for reasons you can't fully grasp.
you're right that I have not imagined a different and better future syste,, but in the hypothetical someone does know of a different and better future system (assuming that we agree capitalism is better than feudalism), goes back to the past, and lies and says there is not a better system.
Second of all I admit I don't know of a different better system, I do not say I like the present system especially, although I get the feeling you must think that I do not being able to think of a better one.
>You are sacrificing the virgin to the mountain god every year for reasons you can't fully grasp.
and you are evidently good at insulting people and feeling superior when they admit they don't know of a better way without providing any concrete arguments for a better system. Must be nice.
I recommend reading “empire of pain” it’s mostly a history of the Sackler family (the family that owned OxyContin). It does a good job of showing how thoroughly rotten and knowledgeably harmful the actions of the owners, lawyers, sales execs, sales reps, docs and government were.
The line that stuck with me was about the CEO at the launch party for oxy comparing confetti to a “blizzard of prescriptions”.
I actually served on a Federal jury (as an alternate) for a trial against a pill mill doctor. I wasn't there for the deliberations but the doctor ended up being found guilty and sentenced to jail. From testimony, the owners were nailed as well as support staff like nurses.
It was eye opening how blatant this was, the doctor was starting people on 160 mg/day of oxycodone which is absolutely insane.
The same applies to online betting and most of the mobile-game industry of today (which is basically also betting). Outside of FAANG-like companies there’s where lots of money is when it comes to being a programmer/IT person, I would personally not touch that industry for almost anything in the world, but there are many amongst us (programmers/IT people) who don’t have those scruples.
I wouldn't touch a FAANG-like company and more than an online casino. In fact, FAANG developers are worse because they're ignorant to the harm they do.
The high salaries are there so you don't look any deeper!
Your examples suggest the opposite, all of those people could very much afford to take the moral high ground. Let's not excuse people's greed by pretending that they would otherwise starve.
It got me thinking that there were probably tens of thousands of people who each made millions of dollars knowing full well what they were doing was killing people and they will never face any consequences for their actions.