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On July 03 2014 02:12 Xiphos wrote:Show nested quote +On July 03 2014 02:00 Pazuzu wrote:On July 03 2014 01:37 Xiphos wrote:On July 03 2014 01:35 oneofthem wrote:
lower population is a good thing Exactly, more jobs for everyone. Less people on the welfare, less people homeless, less taxes spent on those things, more money spent on building infrastructure. Technology/WWs provided us with HIGH population, you NEED a way to control the population. The gay/lesbian rise is an outlet of doing so. Are you honestly saying that more people are gay than in the past and that is somehow a part of curbing population growth? The LGBT movement has not been about more people becoming gay (it happens naturally and is a set thing) it is about people who were in that position not having to hide it; it's totally separate from population growth. People who were gay before were not forcing themselves to have children, like the guy above me said, that's not how human sexuality/attraction works. Utterly ridiculous claim tbh You said it yourself "about people who were in that position not having to hide it" thus more people "officially" come out. The gay/lesbian couples can certainly have an influence on the next generation of their sexuality. With all those media attention and how "prideful" it is to come out, ofc people will get influenced into it and the adopted children of these gay/lesbian couples will tell the kids that it is normal to be in their shoes and there will certainly be an increase of children due to LGBTQ celebration all around. And with the "growth" of the community and how they can't reproduce themselves. What happens when more of a population become unable to reproduce? The population goes down. Some of you guys don't understand the survival of the fittest and how biology is morphed in symbiotic relationship with the surrounding environment to get ahead of the pack. Going back to the job thing: Colleges/Universities are like businesses. That I agree with. So while you are saying that they don't exactly offer you the things you need in the real world, less people will be going there. And less people going to those institution, less money to be made by some investors. And some of those investors are really powerful people in politics, I think they will want people to go colleges/universities rather than not.
WTF? If I didn't know better, I would think you are some kind of AI mining our common knowledge and trying to learn from it.
This logic of yours I cannot explain any differently, you sound like you never go out and meet and talk to people. Zero understanding.
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Bullshit Jobs = Fluff jobs added by government legislation
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I think we're actually a bit short on bullshit job in the "developped" countries. Might be wrong, but call me when we're back to full employement.
As for how to deal with it, stop with the work value bullshit (fucking marxist stuff btw) and maybe follow some crazy leftists idea like Thomas Paine or worse Milton Friedman and start with an unconditionnal basic income.
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On July 03 2014 05:43 2primenumbers wrote:
Bullshit Jobs = Fluff jobs added by government legislation
Yeah cause my friend working for a company who makes bullshit website to shit up google ranking is totally subsidized by the government. Maybe it's time to think this a bit more, nope ?
Edit : not that governments are not a pretty nice source of bullshit jobs, obviously.
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On July 03 2014 04:24 IgnE wrote:Show nested quote +On July 02 2014 21:13 L1ghtning wrote:For such a long post, you certainly didn't have much concrete to say. Just a lot of subjective spewing of opinions. I had to cut out all the things that didn't add anything to the debate, to make it easier to respond. On July 02 2014 10:31 IgnE wrote:
Almost every technological revolution we've had in the last half-century would never have come about in a closed free market system. Closed free market? That's a oxymoron. It's you who want to have a closed market, with the government dominating the market. I want a open market, where the government can operate, but where it's dominated by smaller actors. And we're talking about how the government and the free market handle jobs here, not research. And it's a complete lie that the government is responsible for all technological progress. Our governments are the biggest capital-holders of all. That's why they have their name tagged to a lot of stuff. There's a lot of smaller sized private investors though, and you can bet that they've been involved in the computer industry as well. Private companies also does a lot of research, funded by their own profits. Any company that hire engineers or scientists have a research team. The free market is much more effective in investing in new technology. The government is one actor, while on the free market there are millions of actors. This is why the free market is superior. With more actors holding a smaller share of capital, capital becomes much more sensitive to trends, so it flows more smoothly. When the government invests prematurely in something, it's a huge money sink, and when they invest in something that will actually change the future, they tend to be very slow compared to the private investors. The government have a lot of bureaucracy, and ppl making decisions about things that they don't understand, and they also have a tendency to make decisions based on their ideology. The government can make good decisions, but they're less likely to do so. The more free and spread out capital is, the more smoothly it will flow. Letting one actor hold most of the capital is a very bad idea. The government has just as many examples of more efficiently run enterprises than the free market as the free market does of more efficiently run enterprises than the government: That graph is hilarious. Is that your proof that public healthcare is run more efficiently? Typical leftist mentality. You cherry-pick things and put them out of their scientific context, to try and prove a point. That graph doesn't prove anything remotely close to what you claim. A government-run company that have negative profit can be subsidized. A free market company with negative profit goes bankrupt. This is the crucial difference and it's an important one. Free market enterprices have one goal, and that is to make money, and this encourages them to make their organization as efficient as possible. This is not the case for government-run companies. These companies don't actually get to keep their profits, and if they get into debt, the state can always save them. This discourages them from making their practices more efficient. There is not the same incentive to perform. Anyway, the main reason why companies gets privatized is because they were money sinks. This is why it's not fair to compare their prices and performance before and after, because when the government owned them, the government subsidized them with tax money, which enabled them to stay afloat. The government should not subsidize their companies, because then they start to compete on unfair terms, which makes it more likely that the company monopolizes the market, which is a bad thing. I don't oppose to the government subsidizing certain services, mainly health care and education, but if they do that, they should do it consistently, on even terms. I didn't bother to read about that energy company, because it's not very scientific to draw conclusions from 1 example, because they might be favored by the location, and if they get subsidized, it's a irrelevant example. Government owned companies can certainly in some cases be more effective than private owned companies, but if said company was sold off, then most likely it would become even better, especially going forward. Yes we know that you think the profit incentive makes everything "more efficient." It's too bad you didn't seem to understand half the things I said, and didn't respond to the other half. Talking about "subsidies" in the context of the examples I gave doesn't even make sense ("if they get subsidized, it's a [sic] irrelevant example"). But perhaps I shouldn't be surprised when you can barely string two comprehensible sentences together. You have a weird rant at the beginning about a "closed free market system," which is just a perfectly free market, closed off from government influence, analogous to a closed system in thermodynamics. Then you have weird inversions like these three sentences: "And it's a complete lie that the government is responsible for all technological progress. Our governments are the biggest capital-holders of all. That's why they have their name tagged to a lot of stuff." So is the government the biggest capital holder and investor of all, responsible for, if not all, at least a lot, of our technological progress? If not, why do they have their named tagged to a lot of stuff? It's "not very scientific" to draw your conclusions from neoliberal economic moralizing rather than any empirical basis. Free market American ideologues are the only ones left in the world who hold out against the reality that publicly provided healthcare is a cheaper, better option than private healthcare, and you didn't even address the academic article that I linked discussing empirical studies. The examples I gave were just a handful of the ones out there. I'm not cherry-picking anything. The pharmaceutical industry is also built on the back of government-funded research. You claim that small private investors have funded a lot of technological progress, but you don't have anything to back you up besides your gut feeling and Peter Thiel telling you that angel investors are the reason silicon valley grew into an economic giant. The reality is that government is responsible for most of the major innovations of the last half century or more, and has been responsible for much of the technological progress going back to the ancient Egyptians.
I skimmed through that link and it had nothing to prove your point about "public" companies being superior.
American ideologues are the only ones left in the world who hold out against the reality that publicly provided healthcare is a cheaper, better option than private healthcare
No it's not. We have both "public" and private healthcare and retirement homes, as well as schools here in Sweden, and the private-run ones generally perform better. The left parties here even wants to prevent private retirement homes from making profit, even though they perform as well as the "public" ones. Noone is forcing anyone to choose a private-run retirement home over a public one. If they manage to legislate this, the only thing that will happen is that private investors will not invest in private retirement homes anymore. It would kill the incentive to run private retirement homes, which would make them disappear, which would leave it up to a single actor, the state. Many different actors is much better than 1 actor, because if the customer isn't happy, you have noone else to turn to if there's only 1 actor.
We have a long history of planned economy and government controlled monopolies in Sweden, but we've been moving in the direction of private enterprises for 20+ years now, because we've realized that it's more efficient.
Anyway there's a huge difference between government-run, and government-subsidized companies. All the education and health care in this country is subsidized by our state, even the private owned.
The reason why the Swedish health care is better than the american health care is because we subsidize it, not because it's "public" owned, and like I pointed out, we have a hybrid "public"/private system when it comes to ownership.
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On June 29 2014 03:17 Jormundr wrote:Show nested quote +On June 29 2014 03:06 urboss wrote:On June 29 2014 02:28 Dangermousecatdog wrote:On June 29 2014 02:06 urboss wrote:On June 29 2014 01:59 oneofthem wrote:On June 29 2014 00:14 urboss wrote:
from the interview:
"When I talk about bullshit jobs, I mean, the kind of jobs that even those who work them feel do not really need to exist. A lot of them are made-up middle management, you know, I’m the “East Coast strategic vision coordinator” for some big firm, which basically means you spend all your time at meetings or forming teams that then send reports to one another. Or someone who works in an industry that they feel doesn’t need to exist, like most of the corporate lawyers I know, or telemarketers, or lobbyists…. Just think of when you walk into a hospital, how half the employees never seem to do anything for sick people, but are just filling out insurance forms and sending information to each other. Some of that work obviously does need to be done, but for the most part, everyone working there knows what really needs to get done and that the remaining 90 percent of what they do is bullshit. And then think about the ancillary workers that support people doing the bullshit jobs: here’s an office where people basically translate German formatted paperwork into British formatted paperwork or some such, and there has to be a whole infrastructure of receptionists, janitors, security guards, computer maintenance people, which are kind of second-order bullshit jobs, they’re actually doing something, but they’re doing it to support people who are doing nothing." well if this is what 'bullshit' means here then it's rather flimsy. the 'actually important people' may be fulfilling the function of the organization but the surrounding people are also necessary to save time for these people. there are exceptions of organizational inertia etc but largely that's the rationale for creation of these bullshit jobs, to save cognitive resources I guess you misunderstood the point. Let's say that there are 10 actuaries who do - in the grand scheme of things - useless work. These 10 actuaries need a whole support system to keep them going. They need administrators, receptionists, janitors, security guards, computer maintenance people etc.. All those people do is to support the people that do useless work. That means, those people's work also becomes useless. Actuaries are useless work? Wow who knew that the underscoring of risk in modern insurance which enable the British Empire, the Dutch Empire and other great Trade Empires which exploded into the world in the mid 18th century were totally bullshit jobs! But seriously, how is actuary useless? It is a service in great demand by business, by consumers, by almost everyone who wants to share risk taking. The fact you think actuary is pointless speak volumes. Nowhere did I say that all actuaries do useless work, far from that. In gave an example of 10 actuaries who do useless work. You could imagine 10 actuaries that formulate the corporate risk policy for an investment firm. Or in other words, they are pushing papers for a company that pushes papers. All they ever produce is steam. None of what these people do has any tangible value in the grand scheme of things. These jobs only exist because someone else places value on it. Why does someone place value on it when in fact they produce nothing but steam? Because our economic system nurtures this kind of stuff. Or because it has value...? I mean what is the value of a merchant who sells the farmer's wares in the city square? The farmer could do that himself.
Wow I must say, many of the posters in this thread know an awful lot about economics, insurance, and other stuff that I only found out here (e.g. actuary).
And I read the article, and I have the same opinion that many others have stated, but I have to reply to this comment.
I think the value of the merchant is how much more can he get for the farmer's wares, than the farmer himself. I would imagine the merchant knows what the consumer wants, so can increase the price for the farmer's wares appropriately.
That has obvious value, but there are some jobs that have perceived value. I think this is where the argument truly lies, and thus incredibly difficult to settle.
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I don't think many of us dispute the fact that there are a lot of useless jobs, but a few questions still remain.
First, how do we distinguish what is bullshit? As well, perhaps a job isn't bullshit but has a large team to accomplish what few can do, is this bullshit?
The previous anecdote about subcontracting the computer might contain some bullshit, but the entire system is not bullshit. It gets the job done, but not efficiently. So is there an efficiency meter set in place for said system? Yet again, that magic number of efficiency remains a perceived value, albeit perceived by many (i.e. popular choice).
Second, will removing these jobs affect various systems? What effect will it have in the system? Will it slow down, or perhaps put a strain on an individual? Not all systems (even within the same ecosystem) would be affected the same, but most likely many will be similar.
And lastly, what affect would this have in the overall system? The article implied that most of these bullshit jobs would not have a massive effect on our lives, but all systems are tied together, and would have some effect on our lives.
I am all for removing bullshit jobs, but it isn't as easy as Donald Trump's television show. I don't have any solutions to offer, but I just feel the argument on this thread is going in circles, and I wanted to break that cycle.
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On July 03 2014 05:07 Taf the Ghost wrote:
I clicked to the last page, and this has gotten hilariously off on different tangents.
But one point about US Healthcare: if you ever make the argument that it's a free market system, you're an idiot. Its problem is an utter lack of market forces. US Healthcare is riven with so much rent-seeking, over-regulation, stupid requirements and just flat insanity that it only can function because the costs are so high.
Unless you pay cash, then it's very good, generally well-priced and quite easy to deal with. Funny that.
If you "pay cash" you are paying many times the price that insurance companies pay for the same procedure, as doctors and hospitals charge much higher rates to the uninsured.
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On July 03 2014 06:19 IgnE wrote:
If you "pay cash" you are paying many times the price that insurance companies pay for the same procedure, as doctors and hospitals charge much higher rates to the uninsured.
I haven't found that to be true myself. When I went for my sleep studies that weren't covered by insurance which my ol man paid for, they offered us huge discounts. It's the private insurance companies that are a big part of the problem, and imo profiteering should never belong in healthcare. But no one wants to support a public system with everyone being too selfish and not wanting to pay for someone else, or for the good of a larger community. It's all about priorities- which ends up being profit as all that matters in everything.
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On July 03 2014 05:52 L1ghtning wrote:Show nested quote +On July 03 2014 04:24 IgnE wrote:On July 02 2014 21:13 L1ghtning wrote:For such a long post, you certainly didn't have much concrete to say. Just a lot of subjective spewing of opinions. I had to cut out all the things that didn't add anything to the debate, to make it easier to respond. On July 02 2014 10:31 IgnE wrote:
Almost every technological revolution we've had in the last half-century would never have come about in a closed free market system. Closed free market? That's a oxymoron. It's you who want to have a closed market, with the government dominating the market. I want a open market, where the government can operate, but where it's dominated by smaller actors. And we're talking about how the government and the free market handle jobs here, not research. And it's a complete lie that the government is responsible for all technological progress. Our governments are the biggest capital-holders of all. That's why they have their name tagged to a lot of stuff. There's a lot of smaller sized private investors though, and you can bet that they've been involved in the computer industry as well. Private companies also does a lot of research, funded by their own profits. Any company that hire engineers or scientists have a research team. The free market is much more effective in investing in new technology. The government is one actor, while on the free market there are millions of actors. This is why the free market is superior. With more actors holding a smaller share of capital, capital becomes much more sensitive to trends, so it flows more smoothly. When the government invests prematurely in something, it's a huge money sink, and when they invest in something that will actually change the future, they tend to be very slow compared to the private investors. The government have a lot of bureaucracy, and ppl making decisions about things that they don't understand, and they also have a tendency to make decisions based on their ideology. The government can make good decisions, but they're less likely to do so. The more free and spread out capital is, the more smoothly it will flow. Letting one actor hold most of the capital is a very bad idea. The government has just as many examples of more efficiently run enterprises than the free market as the free market does of more efficiently run enterprises than the government: That graph is hilarious. Is that your proof that public healthcare is run more efficiently? Typical leftist mentality. You cherry-pick things and put them out of their scientific context, to try and prove a point. That graph doesn't prove anything remotely close to what you claim. A government-run company that have negative profit can be subsidized. A free market company with negative profit goes bankrupt. This is the crucial difference and it's an important one. Free market enterprices have one goal, and that is to make money, and this encourages them to make their organization as efficient as possible. This is not the case for government-run companies. These companies don't actually get to keep their profits, and if they get into debt, the state can always save them. This discourages them from making their practices more efficient. There is not the same incentive to perform. Anyway, the main reason why companies gets privatized is because they were money sinks. This is why it's not fair to compare their prices and performance before and after, because when the government owned them, the government subsidized them with tax money, which enabled them to stay afloat. The government should not subsidize their companies, because then they start to compete on unfair terms, which makes it more likely that the company monopolizes the market, which is a bad thing. I don't oppose to the government subsidizing certain services, mainly health care and education, but if they do that, they should do it consistently, on even terms. I didn't bother to read about that energy company, because it's not very scientific to draw conclusions from 1 example, because they might be favored by the location, and if they get subsidized, it's a irrelevant example. Government owned companies can certainly in some cases be more effective than private owned companies, but if said company was sold off, then most likely it would become even better, especially going forward. Yes we know that you think the profit incentive makes everything "more efficient." It's too bad you didn't seem to understand half the things I said, and didn't respond to the other half. Talking about "subsidies" in the context of the examples I gave doesn't even make sense ("if they get subsidized, it's a [sic] irrelevant example"). But perhaps I shouldn't be surprised when you can barely string two comprehensible sentences together. You have a weird rant at the beginning about a "closed free market system," which is just a perfectly free market, closed off from government influence, analogous to a closed system in thermodynamics. Then you have weird inversions like these three sentences: "And it's a complete lie that the government is responsible for all technological progress. Our governments are the biggest capital-holders of all. That's why they have their name tagged to a lot of stuff." So is the government the biggest capital holder and investor of all, responsible for, if not all, at least a lot, of our technological progress? If not, why do they have their named tagged to a lot of stuff? It's "not very scientific" to draw your conclusions from neoliberal economic moralizing rather than any empirical basis. Free market American ideologues are the only ones left in the world who hold out against the reality that publicly provided healthcare is a cheaper, better option than private healthcare, and you didn't even address the academic article that I linked discussing empirical studies. The examples I gave were just a handful of the ones out there. I'm not cherry-picking anything. The pharmaceutical industry is also built on the back of government-funded research. You claim that small private investors have funded a lot of technological progress, but you don't have anything to back you up besides your gut feeling and Peter Thiel telling you that angel investors are the reason silicon valley grew into an economic giant. The reality is that government is responsible for most of the major innovations of the last half century or more, and has been responsible for much of the technological progress going back to the ancient Egyptians. I skimmed through that link and it had nothing to prove your point about "public" companies being superior. Show nested quote +
American ideologues are the only ones left in the world who hold out against the reality that publicly provided healthcare is a cheaper, better option than private healthcare
No it's not. We have both "public" and private healthcare and retirement homes, as well as schools here in Sweden, and the private-run ones generally perform better. The left parties here even wants to prevent private retirement homes from making profit, even though they perform as well as the "public" ones. Noone is forcing anyone to choose a private-run retirement home over a public one. If they manage to legislate this, the only thing that will happen is that private investors will not invest in private retirement homes anymore. It would kill the incentive to run private retirement homes, which would make them disappear, which would leave it up to a single actor, the state. Many different actors is much better than 1 actor, because if the customer isn't happy, you have noone else to turn to if there's only 1 actor. We have a long history of planned economy and government controlled monopolies in Sweden, but we've been moving in the direction of private enterprises for 20+ years now, because we've realized that it's more efficient. Anyway there's a huge difference between government-run, and government-subsidized companies. All the education and health care in this country is subsidized by our state, even the private owned. The reason why the Swedish health care is better than the american health care is because we subsidize it, not because it's "public" owned, and like I pointed out, we have a hybrid "public"/private system when it comes to ownership.
You said private enterprises were more efficient and provided better service than public ones. The article disproves that.
Your argument is breaking down. You are talking about state-subsidized capitalism in the context of "free markets" and the superiority of privately run enterprise. If you don't see why that's problematic you are blind.
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On July 03 2014 06:25 screamingpalm wrote:Show nested quote +On July 03 2014 06:19 IgnE wrote:
If you "pay cash" you are paying many times the price that insurance companies pay for the same procedure, as doctors and hospitals charge much higher rates to the uninsured. I haven't found that to be true myself. When I went for my sleep studies that weren't covered by insurance which my ol man paid for, they offered us huge discounts. It's the private insurance companies that are a big part of the problem, and imo profiteering should never belong in healthcare. But no one wants to support a public system with everyone being too selfish and not wanting to pay for someone else, or for the good of a larger community. It's all about priorities- which ends up being profit as all that matters in everything.
I don't know what you going for "sleep studies" is about but try paying for a major surgery in cash. Or offering the pharmacist cash for your prescription drugs.
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On July 03 2014 06:29 IgnE wrote:
I don't know what you going for "sleep studies" is about but try paying for a major surgery in cash. Or offering the pharmacist cash for your prescription drugs.
Sleep studies are performed to determine irregular patterns, test for narcolepsy, and breathing issues (sleep apnea) and to attempt to explain idiopathic disorders such as hypersomnia. I don't know if insurance covers it these days, but didn't used to (although apparently some did? maybe the high end plans? I was denied in any case). You could be right about surgeries and prescription drugs, no doubt if you're bent over the barrel there is the opportunity to take advantage, but was only pointing out that often healthcare costs are massively inflated by insurance companies (I always hear about the $50 bandaids and such nonsense for example).
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On July 03 2014 06:27 IgnE wrote:Show nested quote +On July 03 2014 05:52 L1ghtning wrote:On July 03 2014 04:24 IgnE wrote:On July 02 2014 21:13 L1ghtning wrote:For such a long post, you certainly didn't have much concrete to say. Just a lot of subjective spewing of opinions. I had to cut out all the things that didn't add anything to the debate, to make it easier to respond. On July 02 2014 10:31 IgnE wrote:
Almost every technological revolution we've had in the last half-century would never have come about in a closed free market system. Closed free market? That's a oxymoron. It's you who want to have a closed market, with the government dominating the market. I want a open market, where the government can operate, but where it's dominated by smaller actors. And we're talking about how the government and the free market handle jobs here, not research. And it's a complete lie that the government is responsible for all technological progress. Our governments are the biggest capital-holders of all. That's why they have their name tagged to a lot of stuff. There's a lot of smaller sized private investors though, and you can bet that they've been involved in the computer industry as well. Private companies also does a lot of research, funded by their own profits. Any company that hire engineers or scientists have a research team. The free market is much more effective in investing in new technology. The government is one actor, while on the free market there are millions of actors. This is why the free market is superior. With more actors holding a smaller share of capital, capital becomes much more sensitive to trends, so it flows more smoothly. When the government invests prematurely in something, it's a huge money sink, and when they invest in something that will actually change the future, they tend to be very slow compared to the private investors. The government have a lot of bureaucracy, and ppl making decisions about things that they don't understand, and they also have a tendency to make decisions based on their ideology. The government can make good decisions, but they're less likely to do so. The more free and spread out capital is, the more smoothly it will flow. Letting one actor hold most of the capital is a very bad idea. The government has just as many examples of more efficiently run enterprises than the free market as the free market does of more efficiently run enterprises than the government: That graph is hilarious. Is that your proof that public healthcare is run more efficiently? Typical leftist mentality. You cherry-pick things and put them out of their scientific context, to try and prove a point. That graph doesn't prove anything remotely close to what you claim. A government-run company that have negative profit can be subsidized. A free market company with negative profit goes bankrupt. This is the crucial difference and it's an important one. Free market enterprices have one goal, and that is to make money, and this encourages them to make their organization as efficient as possible. This is not the case for government-run companies. These companies don't actually get to keep their profits, and if they get into debt, the state can always save them. This discourages them from making their practices more efficient. There is not the same incentive to perform. Anyway, the main reason why companies gets privatized is because they were money sinks. This is why it's not fair to compare their prices and performance before and after, because when the government owned them, the government subsidized them with tax money, which enabled them to stay afloat. The government should not subsidize their companies, because then they start to compete on unfair terms, which makes it more likely that the company monopolizes the market, which is a bad thing. I don't oppose to the government subsidizing certain services, mainly health care and education, but if they do that, they should do it consistently, on even terms. I didn't bother to read about that energy company, because it's not very scientific to draw conclusions from 1 example, because they might be favored by the location, and if they get subsidized, it's a irrelevant example. Government owned companies can certainly in some cases be more effective than private owned companies, but if said company was sold off, then most likely it would become even better, especially going forward. Yes we know that you think the profit incentive makes everything "more efficient." It's too bad you didn't seem to understand half the things I said, and didn't respond to the other half. Talking about "subsidies" in the context of the examples I gave doesn't even make sense ("if they get subsidized, it's a [sic] irrelevant example"). But perhaps I shouldn't be surprised when you can barely string two comprehensible sentences together. You have a weird rant at the beginning about a "closed free market system," which is just a perfectly free market, closed off from government influence, analogous to a closed system in thermodynamics. Then you have weird inversions like these three sentences: "And it's a complete lie that the government is responsible for all technological progress. Our governments are the biggest capital-holders of all. That's why they have their name tagged to a lot of stuff." So is the government the biggest capital holder and investor of all, responsible for, if not all, at least a lot, of our technological progress? If not, why do they have their named tagged to a lot of stuff? It's "not very scientific" to draw your conclusions from neoliberal economic moralizing rather than any empirical basis. Free market American ideologues are the only ones left in the world who hold out against the reality that publicly provided healthcare is a cheaper, better option than private healthcare, and you didn't even address the academic article that I linked discussing empirical studies. The examples I gave were just a handful of the ones out there. I'm not cherry-picking anything. The pharmaceutical industry is also built on the back of government-funded research. You claim that small private investors have funded a lot of technological progress, but you don't have anything to back you up besides your gut feeling and Peter Thiel telling you that angel investors are the reason silicon valley grew into an economic giant. The reality is that government is responsible for most of the major innovations of the last half century or more, and has been responsible for much of the technological progress going back to the ancient Egyptians. I skimmed through that link and it had nothing to prove your point about "public" companies being superior.
American ideologues are the only ones left in the world who hold out against the reality that publicly provided healthcare is a cheaper, better option than private healthcare
No it's not. We have both "public" and private healthcare and retirement homes, as well as schools here in Sweden, and the private-run ones generally perform better. The left parties here even wants to prevent private retirement homes from making profit, even though they perform as well as the "public" ones. Noone is forcing anyone to choose a private-run retirement home over a public one. If they manage to legislate this, the only thing that will happen is that private investors will not invest in private retirement homes anymore. It would kill the incentive to run private retirement homes, which would make them disappear, which would leave it up to a single actor, the state. Many different actors is much better than 1 actor, because if the customer isn't happy, you have noone else to turn to if there's only 1 actor. We have a long history of planned economy and government controlled monopolies in Sweden, but we've been moving in the direction of private enterprises for 20+ years now, because we've realized that it's more efficient. Anyway there's a huge difference between government-run, and government-subsidized companies. All the education and health care in this country is subsidized by our state, even the private owned. The reason why the Swedish health care is better than the american health care is because we subsidize it, not because it's "public" owned, and like I pointed out, we have a hybrid "public"/private system when it comes to ownership. You said private enterprises were more efficient and provided better service than public ones. The article disproves that. Your argument is breaking down. You are talking about state-subsidized capitalism in the context of "free markets" and the superiority of privately run enterprise. If you don't see why that's problematic you are blind.
I think it's your argument that is breaking down. That article doesn't prove that government controlled companies are more efficient. All you've done is throw around baseless accusations. I on the other hand have explained all of my points in a logical manner, and you haven't been able to disprove my logic. All you've said is you're wrong, look at this article and you'll see why, that and you've accused me of having blind faith in the free market, which is a very low level of argumentation. It's what you do when you're fetching at straws, which you've been doing the whole time.
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On July 03 2014 06:25 screamingpalm wrote:Show nested quote +On July 03 2014 06:19 IgnE wrote:
If you "pay cash" you are paying many times the price that insurance companies pay for the same procedure, as doctors and hospitals charge much higher rates to the uninsured. I haven't found that to be true myself. When I went for my sleep studies that weren't covered by insurance which my ol man paid for, they offered us huge discounts. It's the private insurance companies that are a big part of the problem, and imo profiteering should never belong in healthcare. But no one wants to support a public system with everyone being too selfish and not wanting to pay for someone else, or for the good of a larger community. It's all about priorities- which ends up being profit as all that matters in everything.
Except that for pretty much everyone, a public system is both cheaper AND removes the risk of you being the guy who needs the large surgery and thus going bankrupt or not being able to pay for it at all and thus not getting that surgery. See: Any european country.
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On July 03 2014 07:58 Simberto wrote:
Except that for pretty much everyone, a public system is both cheaper AND removes the risk of you being the guy who needs the large surgery and thus going bankrupt or not being able to pay for it at all and thus not getting that surgery. See: Any european country.
Agreed. You're preaching to the choir my friend. 
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How in the world can you put finance and management in the "bullshit job" category ? I mean, how do you run efficient economy without knowing how to manage it properly ? Just compare the the economies now and 100-200 years ago, when these two "bullshit jobs" didn't exist... Actually... They existed even back then... Because they are not bullshit jobs and are needed.
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On July 03 2014 07:34 L1ghtning wrote:Show nested quote +On July 03 2014 06:27 IgnE wrote:On July 03 2014 05:52 L1ghtning wrote:On July 03 2014 04:24 IgnE wrote:On July 02 2014 21:13 L1ghtning wrote:For such a long post, you certainly didn't have much concrete to say. Just a lot of subjective spewing of opinions. I had to cut out all the things that didn't add anything to the debate, to make it easier to respond. On July 02 2014 10:31 IgnE wrote:
Almost every technological revolution we've had in the last half-century would never have come about in a closed free market system. Closed free market? That's a oxymoron. It's you who want to have a closed market, with the government dominating the market. I want a open market, where the government can operate, but where it's dominated by smaller actors. And we're talking about how the government and the free market handle jobs here, not research. And it's a complete lie that the government is responsible for all technological progress. Our governments are the biggest capital-holders of all. That's why they have their name tagged to a lot of stuff. There's a lot of smaller sized private investors though, and you can bet that they've been involved in the computer industry as well. Private companies also does a lot of research, funded by their own profits. Any company that hire engineers or scientists have a research team. The free market is much more effective in investing in new technology. The government is one actor, while on the free market there are millions of actors. This is why the free market is superior. With more actors holding a smaller share of capital, capital becomes much more sensitive to trends, so it flows more smoothly. When the government invests prematurely in something, it's a huge money sink, and when they invest in something that will actually change the future, they tend to be very slow compared to the private investors. The government have a lot of bureaucracy, and ppl making decisions about things that they don't understand, and they also have a tendency to make decisions based on their ideology. The government can make good decisions, but they're less likely to do so. The more free and spread out capital is, the more smoothly it will flow. Letting one actor hold most of the capital is a very bad idea. The government has just as many examples of more efficiently run enterprises than the free market as the free market does of more efficiently run enterprises than the government: That graph is hilarious. Is that your proof that public healthcare is run more efficiently? Typical leftist mentality. You cherry-pick things and put them out of their scientific context, to try and prove a point. That graph doesn't prove anything remotely close to what you claim. A government-run company that have negative profit can be subsidized. A free market company with negative profit goes bankrupt. This is the crucial difference and it's an important one. Free market enterprices have one goal, and that is to make money, and this encourages them to make their organization as efficient as possible. This is not the case for government-run companies. These companies don't actually get to keep their profits, and if they get into debt, the state can always save them. This discourages them from making their practices more efficient. There is not the same incentive to perform. Anyway, the main reason why companies gets privatized is because they were money sinks. This is why it's not fair to compare their prices and performance before and after, because when the government owned them, the government subsidized them with tax money, which enabled them to stay afloat. The government should not subsidize their companies, because then they start to compete on unfair terms, which makes it more likely that the company monopolizes the market, which is a bad thing. I don't oppose to the government subsidizing certain services, mainly health care and education, but if they do that, they should do it consistently, on even terms. I didn't bother to read about that energy company, because it's not very scientific to draw conclusions from 1 example, because they might be favored by the location, and if they get subsidized, it's a irrelevant example. Government owned companies can certainly in some cases be more effective than private owned companies, but if said company was sold off, then most likely it would become even better, especially going forward. Yes we know that you think the profit incentive makes everything "more efficient." It's too bad you didn't seem to understand half the things I said, and didn't respond to the other half. Talking about "subsidies" in the context of the examples I gave doesn't even make sense ("if they get subsidized, it's a [sic] irrelevant example"). But perhaps I shouldn't be surprised when you can barely string two comprehensible sentences together. You have a weird rant at the beginning about a "closed free market system," which is just a perfectly free market, closed off from government influence, analogous to a closed system in thermodynamics. Then you have weird inversions like these three sentences: "And it's a complete lie that the government is responsible for all technological progress. Our governments are the biggest capital-holders of all. That's why they have their name tagged to a lot of stuff." So is the government the biggest capital holder and investor of all, responsible for, if not all, at least a lot, of our technological progress? If not, why do they have their named tagged to a lot of stuff? It's "not very scientific" to draw your conclusions from neoliberal economic moralizing rather than any empirical basis. Free market American ideologues are the only ones left in the world who hold out against the reality that publicly provided healthcare is a cheaper, better option than private healthcare, and you didn't even address the academic article that I linked discussing empirical studies. The examples I gave were just a handful of the ones out there. I'm not cherry-picking anything. The pharmaceutical industry is also built on the back of government-funded research. You claim that small private investors have funded a lot of technological progress, but you don't have anything to back you up besides your gut feeling and Peter Thiel telling you that angel investors are the reason silicon valley grew into an economic giant. The reality is that government is responsible for most of the major innovations of the last half century or more, and has been responsible for much of the technological progress going back to the ancient Egyptians. I skimmed through that link and it had nothing to prove your point about "public" companies being superior.
American ideologues are the only ones left in the world who hold out against the reality that publicly provided healthcare is a cheaper, better option than private healthcare
No it's not. We have both "public" and private healthcare and retirement homes, as well as schools here in Sweden, and the private-run ones generally perform better. The left parties here even wants to prevent private retirement homes from making profit, even though they perform as well as the "public" ones. Noone is forcing anyone to choose a private-run retirement home over a public one. If they manage to legislate this, the only thing that will happen is that private investors will not invest in private retirement homes anymore. It would kill the incentive to run private retirement homes, which would make them disappear, which would leave it up to a single actor, the state. Many different actors is much better than 1 actor, because if the customer isn't happy, you have noone else to turn to if there's only 1 actor. We have a long history of planned economy and government controlled monopolies in Sweden, but we've been moving in the direction of private enterprises for 20+ years now, because we've realized that it's more efficient. Anyway there's a huge difference between government-run, and government-subsidized companies. All the education and health care in this country is subsidized by our state, even the private owned. The reason why the Swedish health care is better than the american health care is because we subsidize it, not because it's "public" owned, and like I pointed out, we have a hybrid "public"/private system when it comes to ownership. You said private enterprises were more efficient and provided better service than public ones. The article disproves that. Your argument is breaking down. You are talking about state-subsidized capitalism in the context of "free markets" and the superiority of privately run enterprise. If you don't see why that's problematic you are blind. I think it's your argument that is breaking down. That article doesn't prove that government controlled companies are more efficient. All you've done is throw around baseless accusations. I on the other hand have explained all of my points in a logical manner, and you haven't been able to disprove my logic. All you've said is you're wrong, look at this article and you'll see why, that and you've accused me of having blind faith in the free market, which is a very low level of argumentation. It's what you do when you're fetching at straws, which you've been doing the whole time.
It proves that one can't say that either government or private companies are more efficient. Hence, the whole line of argument is moot. Hence, your line of argumentation is rendered moot.
I am actually the only one who presented a shotgun of data points that outline a coherent argument.
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On July 03 2014 08:15 Pr0wler wrote:
How in the world can you put finance and management in the "bullshit job" category ? I mean, how do you run efficient economy without knowing how to manage it properly ? Just compare the the economies now and 100-200 years ago, when these two "bullshit jobs" didn't exist... Actually... They existed even back then... Because they are not bullshit jobs and are needed.
Finance, management and their respective field of works are rather broad. Lending and investing for growth and development is good. Market and currencies manipulations, fraud, money laundering, tax evasion, unrestrained speculation...etc, all for maximization of profit$, not so much.
Management is just as important but suffers similar woes, usually in the form of incompetence, failure to report risk or incidents (GM being a pretty recent example), lack of ethics and integrity, grossly overpaid...?
I dont think it was used, encompassing every workers in these respective industries.
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On July 04 2014 07:51 AeroGear wrote:Show nested quote +On July 03 2014 08:15 Pr0wler wrote:
How in the world can you put finance and management in the "bullshit job" category ? I mean, how do you run efficient economy without knowing how to manage it properly ? Just compare the the economies now and 100-200 years ago, when these two "bullshit jobs" didn't exist... Actually... They existed even back then... Because they are not bullshit jobs and are needed. Finance, management and their respective field of works are rather broad. Lending and investing for growth and development is good. Market and currencies manipulations, fraud, money laundering, tax evasion, unrestrained speculation...etc, all for maximization of profit$, not so much. Management is just as important but suffers similar woes, usually in the form of incompetence, failure to report risk or incidents (GM being a pretty recent example), lack of ethics and integrity, grossly overpaid...? I dont think it was used, encompassing every workers in these respective industries.
I think if it was placed in a context of 'bullshit man-hours' vs non it might be a bit more palatable for those who have trouble grasping what the meat of this point is about.
It's not necessarily that entire 'jobs' or 'sectors' are 'bullshit' (although I already showed some that are) but that many jobs have tons of 'bullshit man-hours' (BMH's) Defining what a BMH 'is' will still be a bit contentious, but I don't think anyone would disagree that virtually every profession has BMH's that could be trimmed. The recent rapid rise in productivity while keeping wages stagnant and cutting workers is about as obviously evident as you can get of such a fact. It's also evident on how these types of activities can go on for decades in a free market system and are really never truly exposed/resolved during economic good times, but only bubble to the surface when we hit hard times.
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Working a shorter week would likely make most people feel happier and even more productive, experts say. And research suggests it may also help boost employment rates.
Mexican telecom billionaire Carlos Slim -- the second-richest person in the world after Bill Gates -- recently advocated a shorter workweek for the world's corporate clock-watchers.
"With three work days a week, we would have more time to relax, for quality of life," Slim told a business conference in Asuncion, Paraguay, in remarks reported Monday by the Financial Times. Having four days off would also be a business opportunity for some people, in that it would generate new leisure activities, he said.
But don't go slacking just yet. Slim says people should work 10 or 11 hours a day in those three days. He also says retirement ages should rise to 70 or 75.
Slim may be on to something with his idea, according to some experts. In fact, he's just the latest to make headlines in a long-running debate on the length of the ideal workweek.
"Burnout is huge predictor of loss of productivity," says Rana Florida, CEO of consulting and research company Creative Class Group and author of "Upgrade: Taking Your Life and Work from Ordinary to Extraordinary."
The 40-hour workweek in the U.S. is not some "magical number" for productivity, she says. "You don't have to chain people to their desk."
Shorter working hours make sense in particular for people in highly stressful jobs like emergency first responders, and those in creative fields, Florida says.
Most other countries have shorter workweeks than the U.S., according to recent analysis from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. And workplace productivity doesn't increase with hours worked, the OECD concluded. Workers in Greece clock 2,034 hours a year versus 1,397 in Germany, for example, but the latter's productivity is 70 percent higher.
"Quality of life, stress reduction, and engagement in our work increase with shorter workweeks," says Steve Langerud, a workplace consultant based in Grinnell, Iowa. That said, if income dropped with hours worked, shorter workweeks could create problems. The average household disposable income in Germany is also a lot higher ($30,721 a year) than Greece ($19,095).
Countries with the largest reduction in work hours had the largest increase in employment rates since the Great Recession, says Dean Baker, co-director of the left-of-center Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, D.C. "Countries like Germany stand out," he says. "It's been remarkably successful." The unemployment rate in Germany (5.2 percent) is down more than 4 percentage points since before the 2008 recession, while the U.S. unemployment rate (6.1 percent) is still more than 1.5 percentage points higher than it was before the recession.
Cutting the workweek roughly in half could help to address overwork, unemployment, overconsumption, high carbon emissions, low well-being, entrenched inequalities, and the lack of time to simply to enjoy life, according to a report from the London-based, left-of-center think tank New Economics Foundation. "The deputy mayor of Gothenburg [in Sweden] is trialing a 30-hour week for some of his staff because he thinks that's about the limit for productive time," says Anna Coote, head of social policy at NEF.
A shorter workweek doesn't necessarily lead to happier employees, however. Long working hours might not be as negatively related to worker well-being as predicted by other studies, according to a study called "Work Shorter, Be Happier?" published last year in the Journal of Happiness Studies. While people welcomed the reduction in working hours, those reductions had no impact on job and life satisfaction, researcher Robert Rudolf, assistant professor in the Division of International Studies at Korea University, found.
Five-day workweeks may lead to exhaustion on Mondays and coasting on Fridays, but that's more likely if you don't like your job or feel engaged with your work, or if you don't believe that it has some higher purpose, says Rusty Rueff, career and workplace expert at career site Glassdoor.
"We've all been in places where we've pulled all-nighters and we're going back to the pizza box for the second time and the pizza's cold," he says. "You sort of hate that you're there, but at the same time there's nowhere else you'd rather be."
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EPT![[image loading]](http://www.neweconomics.org/page/-/images/myth4_fig2.PNG)
