Good. Auto insurance suffers from the same cost spiraling principal-agent problems as healthcare.
I think states that nudge but don't completely require insurance have it right (I live near one of them). Even though most people have insurance the plausible threat of having to actually litigate against someone and attempt to collect seems to put huge downward pressure on everything saving even the insured people a ton of money more than offsetting the "risk" of sharing a state with uninsured people. Having laughably low minimums is the next best thing.
Leaders see the cost of a raised right of way or even just a dedicated lane and balk. Which is really dumb because after spending all the money on rail you screw up the last 1/10 by having a tram get stuck behind single occupancy cars. One person illegally parking can hold up dozens of riders. But our politicians still can exploit our bias of rail = good, bus = bad and show up for the ribbon cutting ceremony.
... you don't think the highway construction firms are continually keeping the wheels greased to make sure the funding keeps flowing to them?
"Big light rail" must really be putting in some huge donations considering the lightning fast pace of expansion and astronomical number of new rail lines in the US.
As new moms tend to change their consumer purchasing habits they are coveted by advertisers. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits.h... Certain cohorts and keywords are very valuable so even searching a medical condition once or clicking on a hiring ad for an in-demand job can shift ads toward that direction for a long time.
It seems more important than ever to have self hosted apps or browser extensions that will intermittently search for these valuable keywords. Ad Nauseum is much better than bare Ublock Origin for the same reason.
Yeah I'm less shocked that it got picked up and more how quickly it spread to literally every platform we use, even those that wouldn't have much if any hint that it was happening.
There's clearly quite the active market for this information
While businesses hate being a dumb pipe and love vendor lock in, lots of customers choose dependence on big tech. Each retail business that only has a Facebook page to save the cost of hiring a web developer reinforces this dependence.
Those people didn't chooso Big Tech; they chose the path of least resistance to getting themselves online and in front of as many eyeballs as possible, because Big Tech stacked the deck over many decades to make it that way.
If it's more profitable to keep your money under a mattress than to make things, provide services, or provide loans, the economy will tilt toward hoarding cash instead of more productive activities.
This is the classical argument, but I think it's been largely refuted by practice. Instead of hoarding cash inflationary systems motivate hoarding 'things' and then trying to rent them out to everybody. This is arguably even less productive as it's fundamentally socially harmful.
When the value of things naturally declines over time, there's no real motivation to hoard them. And I think hoarding is less harmful than never-ending rent seeking. This entire issue of sidestepping inflation by hoarding+renting is what led to things like the WEF predicting that 'You will own nothing, and be happy.' That's just fundamentally dystopic because it's setting the recreation of feudalism, under a capitalist shell, as a goal. The unstated implication of their prediction is that the super-rich would own everything, and then rent it to you.
reply