> If you're unable to set a consistent cookie across your user's many sessions (especially for a high retention business like e-commerce), or your javascript conversion events (Google Tag Manager for example) are being blocked, your user's historical behavior will be extremely difficult to stitch together over time.
Yes, that is in fact the point.
Look, I know there are strong financial incentives to build individual user profiles and doing it this way may not violate the letter of the law, but it sure as hell violates the spirit. If we ask a user if they're willing to be tracked and they do everything in their power to tell us no then I'm not sure how comfortable we should be doing it anyway.
Of course people have different risk appetites, including poor people.
The point isn't so much about "risk" per se, it's about whether or not there's a viable Plan B.
If I'm working two jobs to barely keep a roof over my head and play the lotto and lose, I'm still keeping a roof over my head (by working two jobs). The odds are long, but the cost of failure is low.
If, on the other hand, I have the Best Startup Idea Ever (and all the necessary skills to make it a reality) then I will still be unable to pursue it. Sure, I'm like 80% certain it's going to be a huge success, but in the 20% case I'm fuuuuuuuuucked so taking a swing at it is a nonstarter.
Just playing devil's advocate a bit, but what would be the downside of just drawing a bright line that owning stock in your employer is inherently a conflict of interest?
Presumably they are doing something during that week; namely code reviewing all the patches in front of yours in the queue.
Don't get me wrong. I, too, wish that other developers would drop whatever they're doing on demand to prioritize my immediate needs. I would also prefer that they waive their normal security concerns because, after all, I already know that I am trustworthy. I've got enough self awareness not to publish a blog post about it, though.
So capture dozens of messages. Better yet, capture dozens of symlinks to make it trivial for me to review the messages in the original context.
The point is, I've already had a long, sprawling, disjointed conversation with the interested party. Don't expect someone to do manual data entry that will never actually be kept current enough to be useful, and don't force me to have the same conversation twice.
I discuss an issue with someone on Slack or over email or whatever. I can invoke some magic command in band to capture the surrounding conversation and create a reference number. I can then cite that reference in code comments or commit messages. When my CI server deploys the fix, it automatically informs the other participants in the same channel the issue was created from.
The last thing I want is yet another browser tab with another separate inbox to maintain. Interact with me entirely over the channels that I already budget attention to.
My wife owns and operates a private medical practice (she's an audiologist), and it's insane the way she has to do billing and accounts receivable.
When a patient asks about prices she quotes them her standard price for the necessary services and calls their insurance company to confirm that the patient is covered and check what kind of copay the patient needs to pay. Assuming the patient is satisfied with the results of that call she provides the services, bills the patient for their copay, and files a claim with their insurance company.
Several months later (and no real way to predict when), the insurance company will provide an "offer" for probably somewhere around 60% of the quoted price (though this varies dramatically as well). She can accept the offer, in which case she's inevitably required by the terms to eat the difference instead of attempting to collect the balance from the patient. Or she can reject it and attempt to collect from the patient, in which case they will likely be very confused and angry as to why their insurance isn't being accepted, despite her explicitly confirming that it would be covered before they purchased her services.
To be clear, none of this is negotiated or agreed upon in any meaningful sense. She doesn't have any special relationship with any insurance provider. Instead, the providers use their massive power differential to dictate terms. She wouldn't be able to stay in business if she didn't accept at least some insurance, but they'd be quite happy to never write her another check.
She knows what her price schedule for everything is, but it doesn't end up mattering that much since she doesn't know when or how much she'll ultimately be reimbursed except in an extremely broad aggregate sense. The worst part is that she has to dramatically overprice her services so that she can ultimately get adequately reimbursed to keep the lights on, which just ends up hurting the patients who don't have insurance.
Power plant doesn't just mean fixed electrical generation plant. There's probably a gas-fired power plant in your car, for example. And you're correct that the main place fuel oil is price-competitive is in transportation, but that's less a story about cars and more one about the massive amounts of extremely dirty bunker fuel consumed by marine shipping vessels.
Even with electrical generation it's a mixed bag. The recent US fracking boom has also dramatically lowered the prices for natural gas. Natural gas burns cleaner than coal, so to the extent it's pushing us away from coal consumption it's serving to buy us some time. But it's still desequestering carbon, which means we're still going to need to stop well before we run out of available natural gas to burn.
That's exactly backwards. Cheaper oil will lower the operating costs of power plants that use oil as a fuel, which raises the bar that newer technologies will have to clear to be comparatively more efficient, which will in turn slows the rate of adoption for renewables.
CO2 emissions are cumulative, and there's far more CO2 still sequestered in as-yet-unburned fossil fuels than even the rosiest estimates say our atmosphere could safely absorb. That implies that we're going to have to leave some sizable fraction of our planet's remaining oil in the ground, permanently.
From a long term betterment of the species standpoint, what we really want to be seeing is the global supply of oil starting to taper off and costs per barrel drifting slowly but steadily upward.
It does. There's no free market for soup kitchens for the homeless, for example.
There exist entities who are willing to provide soup kitchen services below operating costs in perpetuity (i.e. charitably, for free). The price for services is kept artificially low ($0) by constant infusions of capital from outside the market (charitable donations), which prevents for-profit vendors who don't receive constant cash infusions from being able to compete on a level playing field. The resulting market is thereby warped by the distorting influence from non-market forces, preventing it from operating efficiently. It's not "free", in the technical sense.
This isn't necessarily a bad thing, to be clear. The charitable funding system may well provide better aggregate social outcomes than a free market would for any number of reasons, not the least of which being that one of the freedoms that "free market" implies is the freedom for vendors to decide that some of their potential customers are more trouble than they're worth to serve.
> This kind of system is more or less impossible in the US and it would be extremely expensive.
That's literally how Social Security works, and the fact that more guest workers pay payroll taxes into the system than are eligible to collect benefits from it actually makes it slightly cheaper than it would otherwise be.
As I understand it, we have a relatively small number of people with serious or chronic illnesses whose normal, predictable healthcare expenses will drastically and permanently outstrip their realistic ability to pay. The only way they will ever be able to receive treatment is on someone else's dime, one way or another. And because everyone involved knows they're going to cost more to treat than they can pay then no sane insurer will willingly cover them if they have a choice in the matter.
As far as I can tell the main difference between the socialized food insurance we already have and the socialized medical insurance I'd like us to have is that subsistence level food costs are uniformly low for everyone whereas subsistence level medical costs vary wildly from person to person.
True, but that's subtly different than the point I'm trying to make.
Imagine your hypothetical were reversed. Imagine we already had a network toll roads priced at an average of $5/100 miles, and that we had a plan to build and maintain public roads at an expected cost of $1/100 miles. There might be plenty of good reasons not to prefer the more efficient public plan, but the fact that it would put toll road vendors out of business isn't one of them.
Capitalists don't mindlessly prefer private things just because they're private. We like them because they tend to self-optimize for efficiency more effectively than a centrally managed system can. Usually. There are a whole thread's worth of reasons to believe health care is one of the exceptions, both in theory and in practice. If that's the case, then refusing to implement a superior public system solely because it would decimate the inferior private one is just another flavor of the same anticompetitive protectionist bullshit that makes tarrifs and professional licensing and restrictive zoning and a dozen other types of cronyism distasteful.
I don't dispute that the current status quo emerged as a direct result of government intervention. Again, I agree with you that it can be traced back to WWII era wage controls.
My claim is that, once established, the resulting equilibrium is economically stable. Your claim, as I understand it, is that it's not.
Given that the price controls that we agree created the current status quo were replaced by significantly less coercive tax incentives decades ago and to the best of my knowledge the industry hasn't attempted to realign away from employer-provided insurance since then, I don't see a reason to privilege your hypothesis over mine.
We can't say the prisoners chose to enter the gulags of their own free will, though. Since freedom of contract requires all parties to enter into the agreement consentually, that means that the market for gulag laborers is not free.
The US governent does create incentives which change the optimal behavior of rational actors in the health insurance market, but those actors still have very broad latitude to respond to those incentives as they see fit. That's not perfect economic freedom, but it's a lot closer to it than the systems most other countries use. It also gets noticeably worse results on a broad variety of metrics than the systems most other countries use. Make of that what you will.
"Compared to these, the effects you described are negligible" is also a positive claim, and I did at least as much work sketching out why I believe my claim as you did sketching out why you believe yours.
> Offering insurance as compensation started during WWII when wages were frozen by the government.
Absolutely true, and those regulations haven't been in effect for the better part of a century now.
If you want to argue that long-discontinued government programs can entrench systems that continue to produce market distortions today then I'm happy to agree with you, but that's the exact stated rationale for the broad suite of civil rights regulations that in my experience most libertarians oppose on economic freedom grounds. I don't think you get to have it both ways.
> There is also the fact that employer-provided insurance is almost entirely untaxed.
Again, true. But I think you're drastically underestimating how beneficial it is to an insurer to cover groups of mostly healthy people (i.e. a company's entire labor force) instead of groups of mostly sick people (i.e. those most motivated to acquire private health insurance).
In order for the market for healthcare to be truly free, in the sense you're describing, medical professionals would need to be willing to consistently refuse service to people who can't pay, which is frequently in violation of their professional ethics. Since that (entirely private and voluntary) market distortion isn't going away any time soon, insurers who can find other mechanisms to incentivize relatively healthy people to contribute to the risk pool can provide the same coverage at a lower cost per person.
That means that, tax incentive or no, insuring a broad cross section of mostly healthy people as a group is always going to be cheaper than insuring them individually. And the more healthy people can be incentivized to sign up, the cheaper it becomes for all participants, which gives whoever is making decisions on behalf of the group an incentive to encourage as much of their potential pool to participate as they can. The taxes reinforce this system, but it would still be self-perpetuating without them.
A) Right. We have universal single payer food insurance, also known as taxpayer funded welfare for the poor. We're in essence covered by, and paying premiums to, a mandatory State-run insurance policy such that if we ever can't afford the minimum necessary food to survive the State will (at least in theory) step in and buy it for us from the open market.
B) Let me rephrase. I'm not going to wake up one day to find that my required daily calorie intake has increased by multiple orders of magnitude. There are very few household budgets that could reasonably be expected to absorb such a shock, no matter how efficiently the market for those calories functions.
Yes, that is in fact the point.
Look, I know there are strong financial incentives to build individual user profiles and doing it this way may not violate the letter of the law, but it sure as hell violates the spirit. If we ask a user if they're willing to be tracked and they do everything in their power to tell us no then I'm not sure how comfortable we should be doing it anyway.