I'd rather work with someone who makes good (or even bad) jokes about my code in reviews than a humorless bore who spends all their time policing everyone's appropriateness according to his own stodgy cultural standards.
Why not neither? Why not a person within the normal range of emotional intelligence, rather than either a humorless policer or an antagonistic smart person? Why are you defending his tone with such hostility?
The belief that one can or should judge another person (ie, on the normalness of their emotional intelligence) is quite boring, and is particularly annoying in coworkers. It is by definition fun to work with people who joke around, if one starts with thick skin, an open mind, and the confidence to occasionally be the butt of the joke.
I live in Minneapolis less than a mile from the fifth precinct. There are in fact metric F-Tons of out of state cars in the neighborhood since late last week. Tons of violence tourists driving around gawking, and several cars with NO plates trawling around to boot. The thugaroos we've seen "patrolling", and who neighbors have had "friendly" chats with have been rural white guys feigning concern (White-knighting, one might even say) that we dont have enough guns to protect ourselves. The burning has been targeted at certain businesses that nobody local has beef with (Ie the post office- that racist institution, the gas station that everyone buys their gas from- even if you hate gas companies and hate standing in line, you recognize when you're hurting your neighbors).
Sure, the police haven't arrested many of these out of staters, non-community members, but they are most certainly here. They had to walk back their comments because they can't just say "but we're there in the community and we see it".
He's capturing availability, the manufacturer made the availability. There is no value-adding middle man role with a 10x value here (well value to anyone other than the middle man).
Because he bought them all. This is why, in states where disasters are probable due to natural issues (hurricanes, earthquakes), price gouging is a crime. Not only is it a crime, but it is one where there is full bi-partisan support for the continuance of the law. If you want to put a smile on the face on someone suffering from calamity, first help them, and then arrest the bastard who tried to profit off of it. The first smile will be gentle and gracious, and the second will be of pure glee.
If the gouger actually bought them all then you have a monopoly, which is a different problem. The gauger, instead, bought some. So did many other people. The difference is he's willing to sell his. That's the value to me he's providing. Could you retry your analysis with this corrected information?
I think we're talking about two different things. I'm talking about whether or not a price gouger provides the service of making some product available on the market, albeit at a higher price. I feel that fact is indisputable and I personally find that valuable. You seem focused on whether or not you consider this action of making something available to me is moral/legal. That's a different question altogether. One which I'm explicitly not commenting on.
Your position is moot. Without the emergency, there would be no incentive for the gouger to source and acquire the product. By acquiring the product, the gouger removes the product from the market for those who are following ethical guidelines, so he's not providing a service at all. You can't disentangle the moral or legal aspects of this just when it suits your whim.
Your position is moot because gougers are not the only ones buying up supply they don't personally need. The gougers price the hoarders out of the market.
The fun thing about a lot of people dying is that the government will take care of the bodies for you. Try another strawman tactic, my dude. That one missed the mark.
A strawman is an irrelevant argument, but this one is perfectly relevant: A grave-digger makes money in the event of death, it needn't be during an epidemic, "my dude" (or whatever patronising, PA phrase you prefer)
If people shouldn't profit off disaster, why profit from any misfortune?
>...The first smile will be gentle and gracious, and the second will be of pure glee.
What kind of smile is there when there is nothing to buy at any price?
Before all these laws, in natural disasters there used to be marginal producers (people with a pickup truck etc) who would load up on some supplies like ice etc. and bring them to the area that was hit to make a quick profit. When the electricity is out and someone wants $12 a bag for ice it would anger you if you just want to keep your drinks cold, but you would think it is a bargain if that way you can keep your insulin chilled.
There are tons of people out there who will handle these things for their communities without expecting an exorbitant amount of money. Your scenario is also completely different from someone trying to buy up the existing supply so that he can gouge people.
>...There are tons of people out there who will handle these things for their communities without expecting an exorbitant amount of money.
The article I linked too was the personal experience of an economist who was in Raleigh after a hurricane hit the area. As he writes:
>...The problem for Raleigh residents was all about price, at that point. The prices of all the necessities that I wanted to use to “preserve, protect, or sustain” my own life shot up to infinity. Within a day after the storm, there were no generators, ice, or chain saws to be had, none. But that means that anyone who brought these commodities into the crippled city, and charged less than infinity, would be doing us a service.
There were not tons of people bringing supplies into the city. The state had to actually beg other states and the federal government for supplies.
In the long run, high profits during a shortage also mean that suppliers in general will be incentivized to keep a larger stockpile of things that have a good shelf-life since they know they will be able to make good money the next time there is a shortage (more than the storage costs). If you are going to literally make it illegal to try this, then you better have a government be willing to spend its tax dollars on creating a stockpile rather than spending money on more immediate things that are more likely to get votes. (We've now seen that all the talk of the national stockpile the federal government supposedly had was greatly exaggerated.)
Right and yet most everyone in this thread can agree that it wouldn’t be the most prudent use of it when there are other lives more at risk than yours.
In reality I have not gone out and purchased overpriced goods. I'm wearing a cloth mask when I go out.
In the hypothetical, you have no idea whose life is more at risk. And the central planners who want to implement price fixing, purchasing quotas, etc. do not have much if any more insight than you.
It’s likely people forget what economy was even for. It doesn’t exist solely to serve itself, well I suppose it could if you are a true masochist, but instead a means to an end: health, happiness, freedom, etc
Also there's some weird bug with external monitors where after waking up from sleeping the TrueTone is maladjusted leaving the screen super dark- turning TrueTone off and back on again (of course) fixes it.
Learning German, he says, is particularly useful when applying oneself to the task of understanding the Germans, which he seems to be implying may be quite soon something of interest to (con and noncon) tinental Europe.
Joking aside, non-smokers should not have to pay the insurance costs of smokers. It is all fine and good if you want to do that to yourself, but you should also have to pay for it. Simply not hiring smokers is the right decision, they dont get tangled up in the details of sorting out what diseases stem from smoking and what are natural.
It's different paying for insurance to cover incidents or conditions that people can't control (accidents, genetic diseases), or would be bad for society to not cover (pregnancy, psychological issues).
> non-smokers should not have to pay the insurance costs of smokers
The very idea of insurance becomes toxic when you start to pursue this idea. Everyone has some non-virtuous behavior we can identify in order to exclude them. Maybe your colon cancer is because you didn't eat enough fiber, so we're going to cut you off too.
All of this is why it makes no sense to have multiple "pools" for health insurance, because then it creates incentives for people like private insurance companies or employers to cherry-pick the healthiest people for their pool.
A cigarette smoker that dies between 40-70 with what treatments for diabetes, bloodpressure, asthma, copd, and a heart attack before cigarettes kill them young?
A non smoker that lives to 105 but needs two hip replacements, cancer treatments, and assisted living between 60-80, then round the clock care for the next 25 years?
> The very idea of insurance becomes toxic when you start to pursue this idea
Not really. In general an insurance protects you against risks outside of your control and/or they penalise you for increased risk, and will refuse to pay for intentional losses. We all experience this with car and home insurances.
Smoking and its health consequences are a personal decision and there is an argument that you should not expect others to subsidise your life choices.
That being said, in many countries smokers are indeed made to pay because tobacco products are heavily taxed and proceeds are used to fund healthcare.
In fact, I believe that for example in the UK taxes on tobacco products bring in more money than smoking costs the health service.
As someone who took up smoking when I was young, stupid, and vulnerable, describing it as a personal decision doesn’t fit my reality. I quit eventually but it took 15 years of stop-start, combined with a constant, desperate sense of guilt and failure.
There are limits to free will. Depressed, anxious, abused and sick people are statistically more likely to make poor life choices. Let’s give them a break.
Agree with what you say though. I live in the uk and it did ease the guilt a little knowing that I was at least paying my way.
Tobacco companies, and really every major branded company product, rely on manipulating shoppers vulnerabilities to make money. Advertising has caused a lot of problems that we cannot address until we excise the source.
I'm fully supportive of banning all substance use from tv that is not made by a nonprofit for educational purposes, forcing all substances to use generic black and white labels that Are only differentiated by the brand name written in size 12 font on the back of the container with the warning labels in size 16+ font on the front. Likewise banning all advertisements, and the sale/distribution of branded products associated with companies that sell drugs.
The problem with this thinking is where do you stop? I don't want to pay insurance costs for motorcycle riders, overweight people, people who play contact sports for fun, etc.
And once we're all on mandatory government healthcare, how does that reduce the incentive for the government to dictate the exact same policies (vis a vis 'penalizing the smokers, the overweight, the gun-owners, the non-conforming') under the guise of "Well it's cheaper if we do it..."
Bonus, there's even MORE motive (of the 'means, motive, opportunity' triangle) for them to continue turning the surveillance state against ordinary folks to find out "who's actually smoking and lying about it to their doctor?"
Using my country as an example, any attempt to meddle with the universal healthcare system is treated with immediate and intense hostility by the voting public. The government floated the idea of introducing a $5 copay several years ago and it was met with almost unanimous contempt. The idea was promptly canned.
One could argue that type 2 diabetes is something many inflict on themselves. Should people without this disease pay for their treatment?
What if the person with type 2 diabetes is a 15 year old kid, and their parents taught them bad eating habits which lead to type 2 diabetes? Should the parent's insurance cover that? Or should the parent not get hired because of something their dependent did to themselves?
No, but we should have a tax on sugar that offsets the cost of sugar-related illnesses like diabetes and obesity. Let people make their own decisions, but don't socialize the costs of substances we know are harmful like sugar and drugs.
This solution has many virtues. It discourages harmful behavior without being paternalistic. It comprehensively prevents an entire class of free-rider problems. It prevents people feeling like they're subsidizing another's bad behavior because everybody knows the smoker is paying their way.
And decades ago, people who ate "too much" saturated fat would have been penalized while people who replaced it with hydrogenated oils would have paid less while ultimately costing much more. All these years later, we now know that there was some pretty bad dietary advice/policy and the result could have been a whole lot worse if people were financially incentivized to change their diets.
This is a reasonable counterargument—though I'm not especially persuaded and it's a little bit of a straw man. Are you arguing that there's not enough evidence to substantiate an actionable belief that nicotine, alcohol & sugar correlate with significantly increased health costs? We already tax two of these on that premise—though not nearly the levels required to offset the costs they create.
Healthcare should not be tied to employment (see: corporate-employment-as-citizenship), and the general health of the population is (tautologically) a public health concern that needs to be addressed from the top, not the bottom.
Trying to "fix" people's addictive behaviors by denying them employment is like trying to cure the common cold by wrapping the patient's head in duct tape so they can't sniffle and cough anymore. Poverty and stress are uncontroversially regarded as risk factors for addiction, and in America if you don't have a job and you aren't a multi-millionaire then poverty and stress are what you will get.
Oh, and no, I'm not a smoker. I do drink a lot, which is something that's arguably just as bad or worse than smoking and yet nobody seems to give a fuck about it. Why is that?
Extrapolate that to diabetes, obesity, sports injuries, not exercising >3 times a week... and you start to see why that sort of orwellian control is problematic.
Please note that Uhaul is not banning smoking/smokers, they're banning nicotine, which is a stimulant similar to caffeine. The difference is that historically the most prevalent delivery mechanism for nicotine has been to smoke it, and therein lies the health concern. Some might say this is merely a theoretical difference, since portable vape cartridges also contain potentially harmful additives, but this is more of an economic problem - like cigarettes, it's cheaper to include, or fail to exclude, additives that are harmful to humans when vaporized and ingested. However, there's no technical reason a product couldn't come to market tomorrow that would offer a nicotine delivery mechanism free of side effects. But we'll never find out because for years nicotine has been lumped together with smoking as a terrible harmful thing, and that's simply not true.
statistically, smokers die early enough that their lifetime healthcare costs are lower than that of nonsmokers. I guess that doesn't really matter to a company that only pays for current employees' coverage, but it's an interesting fact.
I don't currently, but I smoked for about eight years. afaik, this significantly increases my chances of various respiratory problems. I don't mind having that accounted for in my premiums as long as you're willing to open up about your lifestyle and see how we can adjust your premiums. :)
> non-smokers should not have to pay the insurance costs of smokers.
I don't want to pay for the insurance costs of alcoholics, diabetics and obese and sedentary people. Where do we draw the line? One of the problems with the US insurance mindset is this type of blame. Is it self-inflicted or not? Who gives a shit, honestly. It's a disease, that's why insurance exists.
I upvoted you because I agree that thought and speech are clearly different things.
However, regulating people's speech leads to contradictions that can only be solved by picking a side- the side that the government decides is the right one, ie the more powerful side. If you're on this side, it's clear that you think it's the true one.
How do you balance the "harm" (hurt feelings, something that all but the most isolated delicacies learn to deal with by the age of 15) against the harm of restricting someone's speech? Certainly there's a similar psychological harm in not being allowed to express one's thoughts? (Not to mention the lost opportunity to engage in productive development of one's understanding..)
European cities have much higher population density, and the lower personal income (often via higher taxes and, ironically, worker protection laws) changes the tradeoff between driving and taking pub trans, so more people take the bus. The tradeoff is that a lot of people live in small boxes.
And european governments have plenty of bs job creation engines like roadwork, too.
Would be nice to have some data. One related observation, that seems less surprising the longer I live here, is that europe has no spacex, google, tesla, nasa, coherent mars rovers, the list goes on... if you give people stuff, they're mostly just afraid someone's going to take it away. But yeah, to echo someone else's comment, I'd rather be poor, or even average, in Europe. I guess being super wealthy here wouldn't be that bad either, since nobody's nipping at your heels.
> europe has no spacex, google, tesla, nasa, coherent mars rovers, the list goes on...
The European Space Agency, Airbus, a huge number of car manufacturer, ...
It's not surprising that the #1 economy in the world has more big company than the #3 one (when they decide to group). A lot can be said also about the American culture and politics when it comes to entrepreneurship. But presenting Europe like its devoid of any important industry is also outright false :) .
