4 ms·

It is nice to see things like this but we shouldn't forget that we can't charity our way our of systemic problems. Example: the recent MrBeast video where he r

by jmyeet 4y ago

It is nice to see things like this but we shouldn't forget that we can't charity our way our of systemic problems. Example: the recent MrBeast video where he restored sight to 1000 people [1]. Really, this should make you angry at a system that allows people to be virtually blind when fixing it is so cheap. It makes no sense from an economic standpoint. People who can see can be way more productive (let alone all the personal benefits of course). But we don't do that. Why? To protect private health care profits. There is absolutely enough food and shelther available on this planet for every man, woman and child to have a roof over their heads and enough to eat. It is a choice to deny it to them. Why? So a handful of people can become obscenely wealthy. That's it. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJ2ifmkGGus https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJ2ifmkGGus

xyzelement 4y ago
There's a chicken and the egg problem here. The reason our country/world has so many resources, is because people with a commercial interest worked had to develop/build it. Like, our medicine is amazing because there historically has been so much money in it, which attracted talent and research dollars. So it's easy to look at that and say "oh wow we have so much, how can we not be giving it away for free" but that misses the point that with that mindset, we wouldn't have built what we have to begin with. People often fail to understand that it's a balance.
- SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago
  I don’t actually know if we have stuff because of commercial motivations. The guys who discovered insulin didn’t do so out of commercial desire. Neither did the people who figured out vaccinations. There are inventors who make money off of their inventions, but they are often poor salespeople and are mostly tinkerers.
  - xyzelement 4y ago
    These are fair points but they are individual rather than systematic. Was in the hospital with my mom a few weeks ago, in NYC. The amount of equipment, procedure, etc she received was orders of magnitude beyond that which she would have gotten in the USSR where she grew up, and most places today. For every piece of equipment, mobile bed, ekg, sensor, sample etc - here's a company that makes that stuff, efficiently and at scale. They are driven by the fact that hospitals buy this stuff, which is in part driven by the patients and insurance ability to pay. Money makes this stuff go round. And yes a homeless person walking into the ER gets a benefit out of all this stuff for free - but only because everyone else pays for them. If nobody paid for it, it wouldn't exist.
- jmyeet 4y ago
  This is what we call the Myth of the Profit Motive that underpins a lot of capitalist propaganda. The myth here is that nothing happens without the profit motive. Another commenter mentioned insulin. Despite insulin being invented 100 years ago and the IP being given away for $1 to benefit people, we're still paying outrageous prices for insulin in the USofA even with supposedly limited patent life. The system has been successfully gamed and government bought so that people can be charged $1000/month for something necessary to live that costs a fraction of that to produce. A lot of pharma is like this: pharmaceutical companies primarily spend on marketing and lobbying. A huge chunk of the so-called innovation actually happens with Federally funded research in universities that we just give away to a company to profit from. If you accept that "our medicine is amazing", what about pretty much every other developed nation giving universal access to health care? Our outcomes (eg life expectacy) are generally worse because we restrict access only to those with money.
  - xyzelement 4y ago
    // This is what we call the Myth of the Profit Motive that underpins a lot of capitalist propaganda Comrade, I am curious - what is the economic system of the country you live in? And if it's not socialist, why have you not migrated to one of the existing socialist paradises? I ask this as someone whose family made the move in the other direction. Life in capitalism is better empirically than the alternatives, it's not propaganda for millions of us who experienced it both ways. // Our outcomes (eg life expectacy) are generally worse because we restrict access only to those with money. Is that true and is it accurate to compare say Sweden which is a small, uniform country (everyone is an in-shape middle class white guy) to the US which is vast and diverse in every way?
    - ryandrake 4y ago
      You don't have to go to that extreme. The Myth also says that with less profit motive, less would happen. But, is that really true? If a profitable corporation has to pay a little more in taxes, and thus becomes slightly less profitable, will shareholders simply decide to "Go Galt," close the business, and stop making that delicious profit? I don't think so. If I was a business owner, and I had to go from making "great profit" to "good profit" I'm still thrilled because I'm profiting. I'm not going to take my ball and go home. Businesses close when they make no profit, or when there's not a market fit, or for many other non-tax-related reasons. I've never heard of a business failing simply because their taxes were too darn high.
Kalium 4y ago
> There is absolutely enough food and shelther available on this planet for every man, woman and child to have a roof over their heads and enough to eat. It is a choice to deny it to them. Why? So a handful of people can become obscenely wealthy. That's it. Can we stop a second and talk about this? Morally and ethically, you are absolutely and completely right in every possible way. There's nothing at all to talk about. Yet food and shelter aren't just moral questions of basic humanity. They're also logistical questions. Having a warehouse of stored grain in Nebraska is useless to starving people in Indonesia without a way to get it there and a way to feed them for all the days to come. Having empty houses in Detroit is not useful to unsheltered people in Budapest without a way to get the latter to the former and enable them to actually live there - never mind if they would accept such an offer. You're absolutely right. These are moral and ethical non-questions. There just might be practical questions in there too. Ignoring the latter to focus on the former is perhaps not an ideal way to identify systemic changes that can address systemic problems. Otherwise you wind up in a situation like San Francisco's, where people point to misleading numbers on vacant housing (and decry the abominable human greed) in order to distract from a decades-long failure to produce enough housing for people.
- lnsru 4y ago
  But why Budapest? People are doing there fine. All ex soviet block countries are doing fine actually.
  - Kalium 4y ago
    Picked at random to serve as an example. Like most places you'll find it has some percentage of vulnerable and marginalized members of the community who are experiencing life as an unsheltered person. A quick search turns up this - https://www.homelessnessimpact.org/post/homelessness-and-the-pandemic-budapest https://www.homelessnessimpact.org/post/homelessness-and-the... I could just as easily have picked almost any major rich world city. A poorer one would similarly have a homeless population, but the point would be less clear.
PurpleRamen 4y ago
> There is absolutely enough food and shelther available on this planet for every man, woman and child to have a roof over their heads and enough to eat. Only on paper. Reality is not that simple. The problems are not solved with giving people food and shelter. Rich countries did that, they still do it, it solves nothing. People will stay hungry, and now they depend on it, and will also raise demand. In the past, we've seen horrible cases of charity destroying local economies, making people even more depending on charity. This can't be an answer for making the world a better place. We can do better, but not with a simplistic view. It will make things just worse.
jimbokun 4y ago
> There is absolutely enough food and shelther available on this planet for every man, woman and child to have a roof over their heads and enough to eat. It is a choice to deny it to them. Why? Because the dictators where a lot of desperately poor people live will use their militaries to control donated food and goods to increase their control over the people.
jimbokun 4y ago
> Really, this should make you angry We are all angrier than at any time I can remember, and it's not accomplishing anything. We need to turn down the temperature of the rhetoric, and start implementing practical solutions, like what you describe.
- jmyeet 4y ago
  > We are all angrier than at any time I can remember, and it's not accomplishing anything Because that anger is being directed towards culture war wedge issues. That's on purpose. > We need to turn down the temperature of the rhetoric ... I'm more concerned with the direction rather than the intensity.
  - jimbokun 4y ago
    Yes "as long as only everyone who agrees with me is angry, and no one else gets angry in response, everything will work out fine".
akira2501 4y ago
> It is a choice to deny it to them. Why? Because the choice to just give it to them will have consequences and will very likely fundamentally change the nature of the society we live in. > So a handful of people can become obscenely wealthy. That's it. That's one consequence. I highly doubt that would be the only one.

by jmyeet 4y ago

xyzelement 4y ago

There's a chicken and the egg problem here. The reason our country/world has so many resources, is because people with a commercial interest worked had to develop/build it. Like, our medicine is amazing because there historically has been so much money in it, which attracted talent and research dollars. So it's easy to look at that and say "oh wow we have so much, how can we not be giving it away for free" but that misses the point that with that mindset, we wouldn't have built what we have to begin with. People often fail to understand that it's a balance.

SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago
I don’t actually know if we have stuff because of commercial motivations. The guys who discovered insulin didn’t do so out of commercial desire. Neither did the people who figured out vaccinations. There are inventors who make money off of their inventions, but they are often poor salespeople and are mostly tinkerers.
- xyzelement 4y ago
  These are fair points but they are individual rather than systematic. Was in the hospital with my mom a few weeks ago, in NYC. The amount of equipment, procedure, etc she received was orders of magnitude beyond that which she would have gotten in the USSR where she grew up, and most places today. For every piece of equipment, mobile bed, ekg, sensor, sample etc - here's a company that makes that stuff, efficiently and at scale. They are driven by the fact that hospitals buy this stuff, which is in part driven by the patients and insurance ability to pay. Money makes this stuff go round. And yes a homeless person walking into the ER gets a benefit out of all this stuff for free - but only because everyone else pays for them. If nobody paid for it, it wouldn't exist.
jmyeet 4y ago
This is what we call the Myth of the Profit Motive that underpins a lot of capitalist propaganda. The myth here is that nothing happens without the profit motive. Another commenter mentioned insulin. Despite insulin being invented 100 years ago and the IP being given away for $1 to benefit people, we're still paying outrageous prices for insulin in the USofA even with supposedly limited patent life. The system has been successfully gamed and government bought so that people can be charged $1000/month for something necessary to live that costs a fraction of that to produce. A lot of pharma is like this: pharmaceutical companies primarily spend on marketing and lobbying. A huge chunk of the so-called innovation actually happens with Federally funded research in universities that we just give away to a company to profit from. If you accept that "our medicine is amazing", what about pretty much every other developed nation giving universal access to health care? Our outcomes (eg life expectacy) are generally worse because we restrict access only to those with money.
- xyzelement 4y ago
  // This is what we call the Myth of the Profit Motive that underpins a lot of capitalist propaganda Comrade, I am curious - what is the economic system of the country you live in? And if it's not socialist, why have you not migrated to one of the existing socialist paradises? I ask this as someone whose family made the move in the other direction. Life in capitalism is better empirically than the alternatives, it's not propaganda for millions of us who experienced it both ways. // Our outcomes (eg life expectacy) are generally worse because we restrict access only to those with money. Is that true and is it accurate to compare say Sweden which is a small, uniform country (everyone is an in-shape middle class white guy) to the US which is vast and diverse in every way?
  - ryandrake 4y ago
    You don't have to go to that extreme. The Myth also says that with less profit motive, less would happen. But, is that really true? If a profitable corporation has to pay a little more in taxes, and thus becomes slightly less profitable, will shareholders simply decide to "Go Galt," close the business, and stop making that delicious profit? I don't think so. If I was a business owner, and I had to go from making "great profit" to "good profit" I'm still thrilled because I'm profiting. I'm not going to take my ball and go home. Businesses close when they make no profit, or when there's not a market fit, or for many other non-tax-related reasons. I've never heard of a business failing simply because their taxes were too darn high.

Kalium 4y ago

> There is absolutely enough food and shelther available on this planet for every man, woman and child to have a roof over their heads and enough to eat. It is a choice to deny it to them. Why? So a handful of people can become obscenely wealthy. That's it. Can we stop a second and talk about this? Morally and ethically, you are absolutely and completely right in every possible way. There's nothing at all to talk about. Yet food and shelter aren't just moral questions of basic humanity. They're also logistical questions. Having a warehouse of stored grain in Nebraska is useless to starving people in Indonesia without a way to get it there and a way to feed them for all the days to come. Having empty houses in Detroit is not useful to unsheltered people in Budapest without a way to get the latter to the former and enable them to actually live there - never mind if they would accept such an offer. You're absolutely right. These are moral and ethical non-questions. There just might be practical questions in there too. Ignoring the latter to focus on the former is perhaps not an ideal way to identify systemic changes that can address systemic problems. Otherwise you wind up in a situation like San Francisco's, where people point to misleading numbers on vacant housing (and decry the abominable human greed) in order to distract from a decades-long failure to produce enough housing for people.

lnsru 4y ago
But why Budapest? People are doing there fine. All ex soviet block countries are doing fine actually.
- Kalium 4y ago
  Picked at random to serve as an example. Like most places you'll find it has some percentage of vulnerable and marginalized members of the community who are experiencing life as an unsheltered person. A quick search turns up this - https://www.homelessnessimpact.org/post/homelessness-and-the-pandemic-budapest https://www.homelessnessimpact.org/post/homelessness-and-the... I could just as easily have picked almost any major rich world city. A poorer one would similarly have a homeless population, but the point would be less clear.

PurpleRamen 4y ago

> There is absolutely enough food and shelther available on this planet for every man, woman and child to have a roof over their heads and enough to eat. Only on paper. Reality is not that simple. The problems are not solved with giving people food and shelter. Rich countries did that, they still do it, it solves nothing. People will stay hungry, and now they depend on it, and will also raise demand. In the past, we've seen horrible cases of charity destroying local economies, making people even more depending on charity. This can't be an answer for making the world a better place. We can do better, but not with a simplistic view. It will make things just worse.

jimbokun 4y ago

> There is absolutely enough food and shelther available on this planet for every man, woman and child to have a roof over their heads and enough to eat. It is a choice to deny it to them. Why? Because the dictators where a lot of desperately poor people live will use their militaries to control donated food and goods to increase their control over the people.

jimbokun 4y ago

> Really, this should make you angry We are all angrier than at any time I can remember, and it's not accomplishing anything. We need to turn down the temperature of the rhetoric, and start implementing practical solutions, like what you describe.

jmyeet 4y ago
> We are all angrier than at any time I can remember, and it's not accomplishing anything Because that anger is being directed towards culture war wedge issues. That's on purpose. > We need to turn down the temperature of the rhetoric ... I'm more concerned with the direction rather than the intensity.
- jimbokun 4y ago
  Yes "as long as only everyone who agrees with me is angry, and no one else gets angry in response, everything will work out fine".

akira2501 4y ago

> It is a choice to deny it to them. Why? Because the choice to just give it to them will have consequences and will very likely fundamentally change the nature of the society we live in. > So a handful of people can become obscenely wealthy. That's it. That's one consequence. I highly doubt that would be the only one.