Patients sometimes went along with this, being indifferent between
spending of someone else’s money or 000 of someone else’s money.
Everything in the US health system is like this, and the Amish avoid all
of it. They have a normal free market in medical care where people pay
for a product with their own money (or their community’s money) and have
incentives to check how much it costs before they buy it. I do
want to over-emphasize this one, and honestly I am surprised Amish
health care costs are only ten times cheaper than ours are.
Why are the socialists better at this? The answer must be due to free
markets.
The weird thing is that I remember him being pro-socialized healthcare in that anti-libertarian post from years ago. Did he trade that off during his treks to the Marketplace of Ideas?
Didn't he also admits that he adjust the ideas he expresses to drive people more to the place he wants? Something like 'these people are way more into libertarianism than is healthy, so I'm acting more socialist than I really am'.
I’m fascinated by how many of today’s biggest economic problems just
mysteriously failed to exist in the past. Our grandparents easily paid
for college with summer jobs, raised three or four kids on a single
income, and bought houses in their 20s or 30s and never worried about
rent or eviction again. And yes, they got medical care without health
insurance, and avoided the kind of medical bankruptcies we see too
frequently today.
the 1950s are lost to history and our only remaining documentary source is Leave it to Beaver. It's difficult to generalize from as the only economic information given in the show is Beaver's weekly allowance.
[this has been linked from a different subreddit] themotte : ['SEE SNEERCLUB COMMIES BELIEVE IN GHOSTS!'](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/13/book-review-singer-on-marx/)
It's extremely annoying. They could've even Bayesed out something that would explain this from first principles. E.g. they could've started with, "it's clear that a significant portion of the population is sociopathic and willing to kill other people for personal gain. I wonder what would happen if a few of them gained political power? I guess that would mean mass immiseration." Boom, leftist politics achieved without ever cracking open a book, which, embarrassingly, is what I did at first. But fundamentally they're fash-adjacent, so they'd never do that.
They even keep talking about paperclip maximization for fuck's sake. How are they this fash in the midst of a humans maximizing paperclips scenario eludes me.
Yeah...subsitute "dollars" for "paperclips" and they'd be right on target. Normal people aren't real to them though, as can be evinced by their fondness for calling them "NPCs". If they did care about more people, they wouldn't be making this mistake.
Speaking of which I was looking at various US health statistics... starting in 2014, life expectancy stopped growing, now with covid-19 (for which we had a number of close calls in last 20 years) the life expectancy going to dip a ton.
Now why is this happening? We are no longer working to our own benefit as people, that's why, rising wealth inequality had led to the situation where we are working for the rich, who are misdirecting us what to do like they're gosplan in the late USSR or something. The sheer amount of engineering effort being wasted on brain dead "proof of concept" and rich people's follies, is absolutely mind blowing as well. For each rich asshole with a cool plan to go to space, there's a thousand rich assholes who were sold on some really dull and wrong business plans that are just not worth working on period.
Why does it take so long to pay off the house? Well if a large fraction of people are doing "bullshit jobs", it automatically follows that more work hours are spent in the country per non bullshit physical item production of which is not substantially automated (like a house). Meaning it costs more hours of average person's time to pay off a house.
That pro-COVID stance in politics... I am suspecting that it is very simple: COVID is inconvenient to rich people, like as an everyday nuisance. They have to either A take the risk of catching it from the help or B clean their own houses. If we just let it spread, they can stay in isolation for just a month or two then it's all over they can just have an immune cleaning person.
/rant
Well, they are predominantly STEM folk, and Yud, for example, thought that Scottish witches were a silly idea, showing that he never processed Macbeth. Maybe they can only understand metaphors if they're wrapped in enough jargon and sci-fi aesthetics.
The paperclip thought experiment _is_ a jargon-filled rationalist metaphor. All you'd have to do is substitute "dollars" for "paperclips" and "people" for "all the matter in the universe" and leave the rest alone. There's a reason they can't think through a story like that even when you're using their own language.
I don't understand why they don't study history if they are curious about what happened in the past. Even if they believe that all historians are tainted by pro-Communist bias or whatever, why not at least use it as a starting point and dig around for primary sources? They seem to think that anything that happened before they were born is essentially an unknowable mystery, which is nuts given that all of them have access to the Internet.
They're not interested in learning. They're interested in feeling smart by saying smart-sounding things and asking questions that normies don't ask. Actually following up might mean they were wrong in their bloviating. I blame grade school for fostering this attitude. It rewards the performance of intelligence while excluding any real demonstration of it.
> I blame grade school for fostering this attitude. It rewards the performance of intelligence while excluding any real demonstration of it.
I feel attacked but also glad that somebody is saying a true thing
> I don't understand why they don't study history if they are curious about what happened in the past.
In my experience of these types they actually do. And by study history I mean military history, on how colonial brits won over X tribe in Y region of Africa or Z order of knights won K crusades or whatever.
Ohh, the good old [masculine provider fantasy](https://www.reddit.com/r/badeconomics/comments/83ll72/raskhistorians_and_the_masculine_provider_fantasy/)!
I wonder how supposed rationalists hang on to notions like this so often.
Is “if only minorities and women had been kept in their place life would be peachy for white males” not sneerworthy?
Because that is what r/badeconomics is sneering at in the linked post. Or, did you have a real comment?
Please don’t you and /u/Rum114 fight
We can all acknowledge that /r/BadEconomics is sometimes a triumphalist cesspool of irritating Dunning-Kruger neoliberals and also that on certain issues there are good scholarly takes on there
I mean I literally had one of the more popular posts (about the history of economic thought) in one of their competitions a while back and I’m basically a communist so I feel justified in saying that
Why would you be surprised that the amish healthcare system works
better than the american one, when EVERY universal healthcare system
works better than the american one?
See I really like The Cat Who Walked Through Walls partly because an ex bought it me like 10 years ago as a genuinely really sweet present, after we came across the cover online and fell about laughing, but also because it’s so badly written and batshit that like all such things it becomes good
I believe many people are becoming more unhinged because of the covid shitshow, and that includes the Scotts. I mean, recently we had Aaronson calling for Bill Gates to become God-King of the US. I think we're a few weeks away from Alexander's tradcath coming out.
It is amazing how much less time you spend shitting when you have to pay for your own toilet paper. Or something ;).
> This syncs well with some explanations I’ve heard of rising college prices, where once the government made easy loans and subsidies available to everyone, prices rose until they consumed all the resources available.
ARGH JUST MAKE IT FREE. Then there is no reason for prices to rise. This is how colleges worked in Europe before we tried to go 'lets optimize everything' in the 80's+.
(Why the new generation doesn't just rise up and kill all old people after hearing old people vote to increase prices for education, reduce benefits, increase the amount of money kids have to pay for pensions which come later and later (for which the people changing the rules didn't have to pay a dime till they were 25, while they were still in their free college education) really confuses me. I would have really thought that kids now being fined(*), because their 15 people in one apartment block breaks covid quarantine rules, would have been the final straw. But nope. Kids these days, so fucking nice).
*: it was news here that the cops would no longer fine people for sharing a kitchen with 15 people...
E: Here is what the youth should do, lure everybody over 30 into musks [tintin](https://4.bp.blogspot.com/_6xoH967aC00/SmdbIFXaPMI/AAAAAAAATf0/lkO5FXkS7-A/s400/ship-tintin.jpg) but [chrome](https://www.extremetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/spacex-starship-640x353.jpg) spaceship, and yeet us all into the sun.
Why are the socialists better at this? The answer must be due to free markets.
This is so bad. So, so bad.
Love me some rationalist discussion in the comments
Why would you be surprised that the amish healthcare system works better than the american one, when EVERY universal healthcare system works better than the american one?
Just on the level of prose-style, the opening four paragraphs of this are completely fucking bonkers
[deleted]