Let's suppose you're entirely correct in your assessment. At what point does this cross a line though? I'd hate to see a comment saying that everyone is helping the government send people to gulags, but that Google only does it because they are required to, whereas the local Chinese companies go much further.
Google is already treading on the kind of thin ice that easily leads to human atrocity. It's far too easy to keep down that path once you've set foot on it and told yourself that it wasn't that bad, or that while what you're doing isn't good, it's at least better than what would happen if someone else were in your position. I don't think that most of the Germans intended to participate in the Holocaust, or if asked if they'd go that far beforehand would think that they could. The Milgram experiment proved that it's trivial for otherwise well-adjusted humans who are polite and civilized to become exactly that kind of monster.
I'm not going to blame Google for getting out. Even if they could have been more humble about it, I'm not going to rag on them for speaking up about it, even if the people who did so thought it was a way to obtain some good press. Somewhere in there was someone who thought of how this might go awry. I don't think it's fair to shackle them with how the PR people decided to spin it.
I think it depends entirely on the context. If it's akin to a lecture where there's someone who's recognized as being the expert, leader, etc. who will facilitate the discussion and occasionally ask for input or participation, you can get almost any number of people. Maybe it falls down eventually, but it's not around sizes of four. Get a group of people who are peers together with no clear person in charge of the group, and it will devolve into these fragments, especially if the conversation tends to be informal or impromptu.
This episode may also lead to congress reigning in all those executive powers they openly dolled out during times that they liked the president.
Neither party thinks like that anymore. They both just realize that eventually their turn will come around again and think of all of the "good" that they'll be able to do when they get to be king.
I think they were just pissed that it ruined the plan they had for the season. Suddenly, a lot of plot threads or other things fell apart (the joke about Bill being the first gentleman and having a first gentleman's club with Bill Cosby lacked the punch it would have otherwise had) and couldn't go anywhere and you could tell that they hadn't planned for Trump to win. No one who wasn't an extreme Trump devotee really did.
He doesn't make anywhere near that. What you meant to say is that his stock valuation increases by that much (and I'm somewhat suspect of your figure as that works out to about $90 billion per year, which is a little over 50% of his current net worth) every day. Even trying to sell ten billion dollars worth of that stock (a little over a months worth of value according to your dubious figures) would likely drive the price down severely as it would represent several thousand times the typical trade volume for Amazon.
I'm fed up with clueless people making impassioned pleas and ignorant rants using bad data and a clear lack of basic reasoning. Also, if you didn't know, we're already having the rich finance the country. The 1% that everyone likes to complain about pay over a third of all income taxes. The bottom half, pay under 5%. The government spending as a percentage of GDP keeps going up over time and yet none of these problems seem to get solved even with all of this government intervention (and several seem to get worse!), so it's little wonder that the people stuck footing the bill are annoyed.
Im sure its been worse throughout history but today we have the ability to end hunger and provide adequate shelter and meet most medical needs.
A good chunk of the homeless population (at least in the U.S.) are the kind of people with some form of mental illness who would have been institutionalized. However, there were some major shifts in public opinion regarding psychiatric hospitals and mental health institutions, particularly in the 70's for a variety of reasons, but this lead to a lot of these being closed without a lot of forethought or planning into new resources for handling the problem. This invariably led to a big spike in homelessness.
The problem is that there isn't a lot you can do to help those people. Some are not mentally capable of holding down a job and some may not be mentally capable of realizing that holding down a job would be a good thing to do. There are still a good number of people who are classified as temporary homeless that are in that situation for a variety of reasons (lost a job and couldn't get anything else, young teens or adults thrown out of home, etc.) that are relatively easy to lift out of homelessness. They mainly just need a place to stay while they get a job and transition back to more permanent housing.
The second group are not who most people think of as homeless when they talk about people shitting on the streets in San Francisco or living under a bridge in LA. The first group is not something that "the rich" can solve, and they can't really solve the second either. If they could, it would be just as easy for you to give all of those homeless people high-paying jobs as it would be for some rich person to do it. Rich people who continue to pay others more than their labor can be sold for in turn will soon find themselves depleted of capital and poor.
You yourself are probably just as capable as they are of actually putting a dent in the problem. You've likely got a spare couch that someone could crash on while trying to get back on their feet, and you probably know a fair number of people who might be looking for someone to do some manner of work. That's exactly what the second group of people need. An opportunity to find work and earn a living and a place to stay while finding and applying for job positions.
The terms were chosen by people with no particular connection to them, and there has always been a bit of simmering annoyance from people who do have a connection.
Who has a connection to slavery in the U.S. at this point outside of a small number of people who are typically smuggled into the country and forced to engage in prostitution, or perhaps a small number of immigrants who were essentially slaves in their native countries prior to emigrating? There's no one alive today who was a slave in the traditional sense (i.e., where this connection comes from), and I suspect you'd be hard pressed to find many people alive who even had grand parents who were slaves.
Further, almost any person can claim a connection to slavery if they want to look back far enough in their family history. It doesn't matter where you're from, your ancestors were serfs, indentured servants, chattel slaves, or a member of some other caste that lacked full status as a citizen or freeman. How far does a person get to go back in their ancestral history before we get to roll our eyes at them and tell them to stop being such a prat?
It also seems paradoxical that the umbrage taken to terminology such is this is more prevalent now, some three or four decades later (or more since someone may have broached this topic even before the 80's) when that connection to slavery would diminished due to the passage of time. The younger generations that seem so eager to seek victim status for long-past history are the generations farthest removed from it. If they want to make the world a better place, they need to get outside and help actual people who are suffering. Engaging in keyboard warrior internet slacktivism does nothing.
If an elevator takes 1 minute per loading, which (between cars and passenger capsules) averages 3 passengers, then the maximum daily passengers from that terminal is 4320.
It's far worse than that, because there are big spikes in traffic at certain times of the day and other times where there's almost no one on the road and no traffic that would cause a person to use this service unless it's overall less expensive. However, it doesn't need to be able to hold the entirety of all traffic, just enough to reduce congestion on the main roadways where everything is jammed up. Also, there's nothing that says you have to design a system that can only load a single vehicle at a time. It may be more economical to make a bigger elevator that loads multiple vehicles at a time, which is what you'd want to do if there are certain times where you'll always be able to fill up that elevator. The really slick design would be an elevator system that can handle a single vehicle for the times when traffic is light, but also has a mode to handle five or more during peak use times.
I think that there are some other problems in your calculations as well. I wouldn't be surprised to find that over 80% of traffic is trying to go to less than 20% of the city, so you can't just plop down terminals evenly as most would not handle enough traffic to be able to justify the cost of building them. There's also the issue that because of this, all we're really doing is pushing the bottleneck closer to the end points. However some of this can be solved by attaching your entry/exit points to large parking garages. At least that keeps traffic from spilling out onto the streets, but it's still an issue when a lot of people all get off work at around the same time and need to queue up in the garage. Fortunately that's exactly the kind of place that would not mind acting as a giant terminal.
Apple rarely introduces new features, but they do tend to popularize or polish them. They certainly made everyone else think it was okay to get on the front-face fugly-bump train.
Maybe it was attached too tightly. So tightly that it cut off circulation leading to necrosis of the hand and a small bit of that getting back into the bloodstream and leading to the death. Then you really would have to pry it from their cold, dead wrist.
Steve Jobs said crap like that all the time. I remember one year he talked about why putting video on something like the iPod was pointless since the experience was bad and then next year told everyone how cool it was that you could now have video on your iPod. If Apple had something to sell you, that thing was the greatest fucking thing ever, at least until the next thing. If they didn't have it, it was some pointless feature and what kind of knuckle dragging ape would want that.
It's generally a good sales tactic. Why tell people something is awesome if you don't have it. Even if it really is a cool feature, I'm sure there are some downsides to it, such as it really killing battery life (why one of their earlier phones didn't have 4G, although they were kind of right about that as the first 4G phones were battery hogs) or whatever else you can come up with. Emphasize what you have. It's the other guys job to try to sell their product and if they're your competition don't do their job for them.
A lot of the same stuff is true for Android phones as well. If you buy the latest Samsung or HTC flagship, it will only be six months until there's something new and better. The only real difference is that not getting updates for your phone happens closer to Year 2 for a lot of devices, but for most users that updates aren't terribly important. For some, it's realistically Day 1 if the sales are bad and the manufacturer doesn't want to bother with support.
Anyone who buys a flagship phone that they replace every year (regardless of whether it's Android or iOS) is kind of an idiot or is just a major tech enthusiast that probably buys new phones every few months just to try them out.
No one is going to pay people to do this job. The recycling process itself is expensive (and the materials recovered limited) and adding a person making even minimum wage to the mix makes it prohibitively so. Even the Chinese have started dumping e-waste since labor has become too expensive.
I kind of recall Apple showing off a robot that could disassemble their iPhones a few years ago. I don't know if anything ever came of that, but that's essentially what you need if you want to have any hope of recycling gadgets to be economically viable.
Not everyone agrees on what constitutes moral behavior. There are some people who consider me immoral because I don't pray to their sky fairy, and even a few who would believe that it's perfectly moral for them to kill me for speaking ill of their sky fairy. If you looked at the entire world's population, the majority probably consider the behavior that I just described as moral.
I don't consider "making money" to be a moral requirement personally, but if someone wants to use that as the basis for their belief system that's their own business. If you're some kind of crazed utilitarian, "making money" could be the most moral thing on the planet.
internationally is that you're buying from countries that have single payer healthcare and therefore can negotiate much, much better drug prices than private insurance companies can/do.
Nonsense. Internationally, you're buying from a country that doesn't give two shits about enforcing U.S. IP laws so there are a bunch of different companies that are making those medications, which means they must compete on either price or quality. Even if an individual country assigns monopoly rights to a particular company and enforces a price (as some countries do), shopping internationally still allows a customer to choose between competing entities on price. You'll end up buying from those countries that allow for multiple manufacturers unless you don't trust the quality.
Food, housing, and clothing are all just as, if not more, necessary as healthcare. According to you, these goods shouldn't work in a free market either because they're a matter of life or death, or in the case of houses you don't need a new one frequently, etc. Yet we don't have single payer systems for any of those goods, and it seems consumers have managed to get along fine without a national system. Countries where the government has attempted to get involved with housing or food distribution tend to end up in disaster.
I don't think private, for profit companies lead to bad situations. Food is just as (if not more) necessary as healthcare and the free market has no problems feeding everyone. Perhaps its even too good at it given the prevalence of obesity. We haven't had to nationalize the agriculture industry or implement single payer grocery stores. The notion that we need to to this for health care or that it's the only solution is dubious.
Most of the countries with single payer systems also allow for private health care and it typically constitutes a non-trivial (> 10%) of spending. National health care systems tend to work well up until you get sick of waiting months to see a specialist or get a surgery that could be done in a few weeks. Those who can afford it will get it done privately or travel outside of the country to have the procedure performed there.
Drugs are effectively a monopoly situation due to government intervention. First, government agencies regulate what can and can't be sold as a drug. There may be a perfectly good medicine that already exists and is being sold in other countries, but if it's not FDA approved, you may be SOL. It's illegal for anyone to sell that medication to you. Second, governments enforce intellectual property rights which create a monopoly. The countries that don't respect or enforce these IP rights can churn out some of these $2,000 medicines for under a dollar. The process for extending (or granting new) IP rights for minor changes to a drug's chemistry is also abused, which can create perpetual monopolies.
You can't claim that markets fail to correct for a behavior when a government has made it explicitly impossible for them to do so. It's no more fair that the conservative argument that government can't work effectively after it's been defunded or otherwise crippled. If you violate the preconditions, there's no guarantee of the postconditions. That much should be obvious regardless of context.
I'm not suggesting that we need a completely laissez-faire system where anyone can sell whatever they want as medication either. You don't need to have a system of pure government control or a complete lack of it. However, you can't make it illegal for competition to exist or make it insanely expensive to certify medications without expecting the prices to be high.
The law does nothing to address that people who aren't responsible enough to recycle their gadgets in the first place aren't going to be responsible enough to pull the battery before they ditch them or that they won't throw out batteries themselves when they age but the device is otherwise fine.
The law would likely take several years before going into effect, which does nothing to help solve the problem in the intermediary period or for the large volume of existing gadgets.
The law does nothing to solve the issue that it's often difficult to recycle any of these gadgets or components at all and that even if you can pay a Chinese company to take them for recycling, it may not actually be economically viable for them to recycle the gadget or battery and they're really just dumping it all somewhere else.
This problem is hard to solve. Maybe we should make a law against people proposing making simplistic laws to solve complex problems. Of course we all know how well that would work out.
See Dick and Jane with a 3-pack-a-day habit. See Dick and Jane pay thousands in tobacco taxes every year. Watch Dick and Jane get lung cancer and spend many tens of thousands on medical treatment and hospice costs. See the Government and healthcare providers run away with pockets bulging with cash. Run, merchants of death, run!
My library must not have stocked this particular book. Do you know which one this was featured in?
Vaping might not be as harmful as cigarettes, but I don't know if it's harmless, or at least as close to it as anything could be. You're still inhaling something other than air into your lungs and that's going to have some side effects. They might be so small or require such repeated exposure that the health issues are essentially non-existent for the average person in otherwise good health, but I think the jury is still out on if there are any significant long term effects from prolonged use.
I'd put it as a "least concern" type of item, but I wouldn't want to tell anyone that it's perfectly safe to vape all day long for their entire life.
You assume that young people will do any better or that they have a "real" understanding of the internet. If you look at some of the groups of young people that are screaming the loudest, they'd seem to be the biggest censors of the internet with their demand for safe spaces and a ban on any expression that hurts their feelings. There are also a lot of young people that are going to throw in with the right-wing anti-immigration parties that are starting to spring up because they see that as more important than something going on with the internet. I don't know if those groups even have any opinion on this particular topic, but I don't think getting the younger voters involved will do anything.
In the U.S. the joke (from about two decades ago) about younger people voting was that it was the younger college voters in Minnesota that got Jesse Ventura elected. If you're not familiar with him, he's a bit of a conspiracy nut among other things. Probably an okay guy to be friends with, just not what I would consider governor material. I think the youth vote was also up in the 2016 election and we ended up with Trump, so I don't see it making a difference in this case either.
I think that's just because it's impossible to whine with his voice. If he tries, everything just sounds too majestic and he can't finish. At best, he can make what sounds like a well reasoned complaint, but no one will interpret it as whining.
In the case of the U.S. we're already spending trillions of dollars for terribly implemented social programs. If you took social security, medicare, and the other mandatory spending and rolled it into a UBI, you could give every adult $10,000 per year based on the current spending levels. We're already paying and if you look at where the U.S. tax revenues come from, the middle class aren't paying for most of it. The top ~15% cover about 80% of income taxes (2015 figures) and that puts the cutoff at around $100,000, which is upper middle class for most of the country.
I think we could actually reduce spending with a UBI. There are some people who think it needs to be enough to own a home or some pie in the sky lunacy, but I think it just needs to be enough to keep a person from dying in the street. There are plenty of places in the U.S. where you could live for $10,000 per year without doing anything else. Add even a part time job at federal minimum wage and there's little question about being able to subsist. We could probably have a UBI while reducing government spending.
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Let's suppose you're entirely correct in your assessment. At what point does this cross a line though? I'd hate to see a comment saying that everyone is helping the government send people to gulags, but that Google only does it because they are required to, whereas the local Chinese companies go much further.
Google is already treading on the kind of thin ice that easily leads to human atrocity. It's far too easy to keep down that path once you've set foot on it and told yourself that it wasn't that bad, or that while what you're doing isn't good, it's at least better than what would happen if someone else were in your position. I don't think that most of the Germans intended to participate in the Holocaust, or if asked if they'd go that far beforehand would think that they could. The Milgram experiment proved that it's trivial for otherwise well-adjusted humans who are polite and civilized to become exactly that kind of monster.
I'm not going to blame Google for getting out. Even if they could have been more humble about it, I'm not going to rag on them for speaking up about it, even if the people who did so thought it was a way to obtain some good press. Somewhere in there was someone who thought of how this might go awry. I don't think it's fair to shackle them with how the PR people decided to spin it.
I think it depends entirely on the context. If it's akin to a lecture where there's someone who's recognized as being the expert, leader, etc. who will facilitate the discussion and occasionally ask for input or participation, you can get almost any number of people. Maybe it falls down eventually, but it's not around sizes of four. Get a group of people who are peers together with no clear person in charge of the group, and it will devolve into these fragments, especially if the conversation tends to be informal or impromptu.
This episode may also lead to congress reigning in all those executive powers they openly dolled out during times that they liked the president.
Neither party thinks like that anymore. They both just realize that eventually their turn will come around again and think of all of the "good" that they'll be able to do when they get to be king.
I think they were just pissed that it ruined the plan they had for the season. Suddenly, a lot of plot threads or other things fell apart (the joke about Bill being the first gentleman and having a first gentleman's club with Bill Cosby lacked the punch it would have otherwise had) and couldn't go anywhere and you could tell that they hadn't planned for Trump to win. No one who wasn't an extreme Trump devotee really did.
He doesn't make anywhere near that. What you meant to say is that his stock valuation increases by that much (and I'm somewhat suspect of your figure as that works out to about $90 billion per year, which is a little over 50% of his current net worth) every day. Even trying to sell ten billion dollars worth of that stock (a little over a months worth of value according to your dubious figures) would likely drive the price down severely as it would represent several thousand times the typical trade volume for Amazon.
I'm fed up with clueless people making impassioned pleas and ignorant rants using bad data and a clear lack of basic reasoning. Also, if you didn't know, we're already having the rich finance the country. The 1% that everyone likes to complain about pay over a third of all income taxes. The bottom half, pay under 5%. The government spending as a percentage of GDP keeps going up over time and yet none of these problems seem to get solved even with all of this government intervention (and several seem to get worse!), so it's little wonder that the people stuck footing the bill are annoyed.
Im sure its been worse throughout history but today we have the ability to end hunger and provide adequate shelter and meet most medical needs.
A good chunk of the homeless population (at least in the U.S.) are the kind of people with some form of mental illness who would have been institutionalized. However, there were some major shifts in public opinion regarding psychiatric hospitals and mental health institutions, particularly in the 70's for a variety of reasons, but this lead to a lot of these being closed without a lot of forethought or planning into new resources for handling the problem. This invariably led to a big spike in homelessness.
The problem is that there isn't a lot you can do to help those people. Some are not mentally capable of holding down a job and some may not be mentally capable of realizing that holding down a job would be a good thing to do. There are still a good number of people who are classified as temporary homeless that are in that situation for a variety of reasons (lost a job and couldn't get anything else, young teens or adults thrown out of home, etc.) that are relatively easy to lift out of homelessness. They mainly just need a place to stay while they get a job and transition back to more permanent housing.
The second group are not who most people think of as homeless when they talk about people shitting on the streets in San Francisco or living under a bridge in LA. The first group is not something that "the rich" can solve, and they can't really solve the second either. If they could, it would be just as easy for you to give all of those homeless people high-paying jobs as it would be for some rich person to do it. Rich people who continue to pay others more than their labor can be sold for in turn will soon find themselves depleted of capital and poor.
You yourself are probably just as capable as they are of actually putting a dent in the problem. You've likely got a spare couch that someone could crash on while trying to get back on their feet, and you probably know a fair number of people who might be looking for someone to do some manner of work. That's exactly what the second group of people need. An opportunity to find work and earn a living and a place to stay while finding and applying for job positions.
The terms were chosen by people with no particular connection to them, and there has always been a bit of simmering annoyance from people who do have a connection.
Who has a connection to slavery in the U.S. at this point outside of a small number of people who are typically smuggled into the country and forced to engage in prostitution, or perhaps a small number of immigrants who were essentially slaves in their native countries prior to emigrating? There's no one alive today who was a slave in the traditional sense (i.e., where this connection comes from), and I suspect you'd be hard pressed to find many people alive who even had grand parents who were slaves.
Further, almost any person can claim a connection to slavery if they want to look back far enough in their family history. It doesn't matter where you're from, your ancestors were serfs, indentured servants, chattel slaves, or a member of some other caste that lacked full status as a citizen or freeman. How far does a person get to go back in their ancestral history before we get to roll our eyes at them and tell them to stop being such a prat?
It also seems paradoxical that the umbrage taken to terminology such is this is more prevalent now, some three or four decades later (or more since someone may have broached this topic even before the 80's) when that connection to slavery would diminished due to the passage of time. The younger generations that seem so eager to seek victim status for long-past history are the generations farthest removed from it. If they want to make the world a better place, they need to get outside and help actual people who are suffering. Engaging in keyboard warrior internet slacktivism does nothing.
If an elevator takes 1 minute per loading, which (between cars and passenger capsules) averages 3 passengers, then the maximum daily passengers from that terminal is 4320.
It's far worse than that, because there are big spikes in traffic at certain times of the day and other times where there's almost no one on the road and no traffic that would cause a person to use this service unless it's overall less expensive. However, it doesn't need to be able to hold the entirety of all traffic, just enough to reduce congestion on the main roadways where everything is jammed up. Also, there's nothing that says you have to design a system that can only load a single vehicle at a time. It may be more economical to make a bigger elevator that loads multiple vehicles at a time, which is what you'd want to do if there are certain times where you'll always be able to fill up that elevator. The really slick design would be an elevator system that can handle a single vehicle for the times when traffic is light, but also has a mode to handle five or more during peak use times.
I think that there are some other problems in your calculations as well. I wouldn't be surprised to find that over 80% of traffic is trying to go to less than 20% of the city, so you can't just plop down terminals evenly as most would not handle enough traffic to be able to justify the cost of building them. There's also the issue that because of this, all we're really doing is pushing the bottleneck closer to the end points. However some of this can be solved by attaching your entry/exit points to large parking garages. At least that keeps traffic from spilling out onto the streets, but it's still an issue when a lot of people all get off work at around the same time and need to queue up in the garage. Fortunately that's exactly the kind of place that would not mind acting as a giant terminal.
Apple rarely introduces new features, but they do tend to popularize or polish them. They certainly made everyone else think it was okay to get on the front-face fugly-bump train.
Maybe it was attached too tightly. So tightly that it cut off circulation leading to necrosis of the hand and a small bit of that getting back into the bloodstream and leading to the death. Then you really would have to pry it from their cold, dead wrist.
Steve Jobs said crap like that all the time. I remember one year he talked about why putting video on something like the iPod was pointless since the experience was bad and then next year told everyone how cool it was that you could now have video on your iPod. If Apple had something to sell you, that thing was the greatest fucking thing ever, at least until the next thing. If they didn't have it, it was some pointless feature and what kind of knuckle dragging ape would want that.
It's generally a good sales tactic. Why tell people something is awesome if you don't have it. Even if it really is a cool feature, I'm sure there are some downsides to it, such as it really killing battery life (why one of their earlier phones didn't have 4G, although they were kind of right about that as the first 4G phones were battery hogs) or whatever else you can come up with. Emphasize what you have. It's the other guys job to try to sell their product and if they're your competition don't do their job for them.
A lot of the same stuff is true for Android phones as well. If you buy the latest Samsung or HTC flagship, it will only be six months until there's something new and better. The only real difference is that not getting updates for your phone happens closer to Year 2 for a lot of devices, but for most users that updates aren't terribly important. For some, it's realistically Day 1 if the sales are bad and the manufacturer doesn't want to bother with support.
Anyone who buys a flagship phone that they replace every year (regardless of whether it's Android or iOS) is kind of an idiot or is just a major tech enthusiast that probably buys new phones every few months just to try them out.
No one is going to pay people to do this job. The recycling process itself is expensive (and the materials recovered limited) and adding a person making even minimum wage to the mix makes it prohibitively so. Even the Chinese have started dumping e-waste since labor has become too expensive.
I kind of recall Apple showing off a robot that could disassemble their iPhones a few years ago. I don't know if anything ever came of that, but that's essentially what you need if you want to have any hope of recycling gadgets to be economically viable.
Not everyone agrees on what constitutes moral behavior. There are some people who consider me immoral because I don't pray to their sky fairy, and even a few who would believe that it's perfectly moral for them to kill me for speaking ill of their sky fairy. If you looked at the entire world's population, the majority probably consider the behavior that I just described as moral.
I don't consider "making money" to be a moral requirement personally, but if someone wants to use that as the basis for their belief system that's their own business. If you're some kind of crazed utilitarian, "making money" could be the most moral thing on the planet.
internationally is that you're buying from countries that have single payer healthcare and therefore can negotiate much, much better drug prices than private insurance companies can/do.
Nonsense. Internationally, you're buying from a country that doesn't give two shits about enforcing U.S. IP laws so there are a bunch of different companies that are making those medications, which means they must compete on either price or quality. Even if an individual country assigns monopoly rights to a particular company and enforces a price (as some countries do), shopping internationally still allows a customer to choose between competing entities on price. You'll end up buying from those countries that allow for multiple manufacturers unless you don't trust the quality.
Food, housing, and clothing are all just as, if not more, necessary as healthcare. According to you, these goods shouldn't work in a free market either because they're a matter of life or death, or in the case of houses you don't need a new one frequently, etc. Yet we don't have single payer systems for any of those goods, and it seems consumers have managed to get along fine without a national system. Countries where the government has attempted to get involved with housing or food distribution tend to end up in disaster.
I don't think private, for profit companies lead to bad situations. Food is just as (if not more) necessary as healthcare and the free market has no problems feeding everyone. Perhaps its even too good at it given the prevalence of obesity. We haven't had to nationalize the agriculture industry or implement single payer grocery stores. The notion that we need to to this for health care or that it's the only solution is dubious.
Most of the countries with single payer systems also allow for private health care and it typically constitutes a non-trivial (> 10%) of spending. National health care systems tend to work well up until you get sick of waiting months to see a specialist or get a surgery that could be done in a few weeks. Those who can afford it will get it done privately or travel outside of the country to have the procedure performed there.
Drugs are effectively a monopoly situation due to government intervention. First, government agencies regulate what can and can't be sold as a drug. There may be a perfectly good medicine that already exists and is being sold in other countries, but if it's not FDA approved, you may be SOL. It's illegal for anyone to sell that medication to you. Second, governments enforce intellectual property rights which create a monopoly. The countries that don't respect or enforce these IP rights can churn out some of these $2,000 medicines for under a dollar. The process for extending (or granting new) IP rights for minor changes to a drug's chemistry is also abused, which can create perpetual monopolies.
You can't claim that markets fail to correct for a behavior when a government has made it explicitly impossible for them to do so. It's no more fair that the conservative argument that government can't work effectively after it's been defunded or otherwise crippled. If you violate the preconditions, there's no guarantee of the postconditions. That much should be obvious regardless of context.
I'm not suggesting that we need a completely laissez-faire system where anyone can sell whatever they want as medication either. You don't need to have a system of pure government control or a complete lack of it. However, you can't make it illegal for competition to exist or make it insanely expensive to certify medications without expecting the prices to be high.
The law does nothing to address that people who aren't responsible enough to recycle their gadgets in the first place aren't going to be responsible enough to pull the battery before they ditch them or that they won't throw out batteries themselves when they age but the device is otherwise fine.
The law would likely take several years before going into effect, which does nothing to help solve the problem in the intermediary period or for the large volume of existing gadgets.
The law does nothing to solve the issue that it's often difficult to recycle any of these gadgets or components at all and that even if you can pay a Chinese company to take them for recycling, it may not actually be economically viable for them to recycle the gadget or battery and they're really just dumping it all somewhere else.
This problem is hard to solve. Maybe we should make a law against people proposing making simplistic laws to solve complex problems. Of course we all know how well that would work out.
See Dick and Jane with a 3-pack-a-day habit. See Dick and Jane pay thousands in tobacco taxes every year. Watch Dick and Jane get lung cancer and spend many tens of thousands on medical treatment and hospice costs. See the Government and healthcare providers run away with pockets bulging with cash. Run, merchants of death, run!
My library must not have stocked this particular book. Do you know which one this was featured in?
Vaping might not be as harmful as cigarettes, but I don't know if it's harmless, or at least as close to it as anything could be. You're still inhaling something other than air into your lungs and that's going to have some side effects. They might be so small or require such repeated exposure that the health issues are essentially non-existent for the average person in otherwise good health, but I think the jury is still out on if there are any significant long term effects from prolonged use.
I'd put it as a "least concern" type of item, but I wouldn't want to tell anyone that it's perfectly safe to vape all day long for their entire life.
Keep your kid away from socializing online and they will become outcasts and misfits.
Yeah, but it isn't like anyone talks to the people who aren't outcasts and misfits anyways. They just get texts.
You assume that young people will do any better or that they have a "real" understanding of the internet. If you look at some of the groups of young people that are screaming the loudest, they'd seem to be the biggest censors of the internet with their demand for safe spaces and a ban on any expression that hurts their feelings. There are also a lot of young people that are going to throw in with the right-wing anti-immigration parties that are starting to spring up because they see that as more important than something going on with the internet. I don't know if those groups even have any opinion on this particular topic, but I don't think getting the younger voters involved will do anything.
In the U.S. the joke (from about two decades ago) about younger people voting was that it was the younger college voters in Minnesota that got Jesse Ventura elected. If you're not familiar with him, he's a bit of a conspiracy nut among other things. Probably an okay guy to be friends with, just not what I would consider governor material. I think the youth vote was also up in the 2016 election and we ended up with Trump, so I don't see it making a difference in this case either.
You might have more of a point if the UK weren't actively trying to clamp down on the internet in their own various ways.
I think that's just because it's impossible to whine with his voice. If he tries, everything just sounds too majestic and he can't finish. At best, he can make what sounds like a well reasoned complaint, but no one will interpret it as whining.
In the case of the U.S. we're already spending trillions of dollars for terribly implemented social programs. If you took social security, medicare, and the other mandatory spending and rolled it into a UBI, you could give every adult $10,000 per year based on the current spending levels. We're already paying and if you look at where the U.S. tax revenues come from, the middle class aren't paying for most of it. The top ~15% cover about 80% of income taxes (2015 figures) and that puts the cutoff at around $100,000, which is upper middle class for most of the country.
I think we could actually reduce spending with a UBI. There are some people who think it needs to be enough to own a home or some pie in the sky lunacy, but I think it just needs to be enough to keep a person from dying in the street. There are plenty of places in the U.S. where you could live for $10,000 per year without doing anything else. Add even a part time job at federal minimum wage and there's little question about being able to subsist. We could probably have a UBI while reducing government spending.