As someone here with limited coding experience. I have built several custom applications that are too unique to be made by anyone. Now I can make several simple applications that do exactly what I need and want. It’s cut out hours of administrative work stuff I had to do. Do I share nope I gatekeep it at work. If only IT built these systems and databases to be easily used by us users.
It might not solve the problem but we also have other countries buying up homes for pension accounts. Take AU for example doing this. Should be illegal regardless of the size.
If they then rent these houses out and keep them maintained I don't care that they own them. Of course they should not be allowed to have a monopoly on houses in any area (including indirect monopoly by agreeing to minimum prices with others). Landlord is an important job that someone needs to do for the people who owning their own house is the wrong decision.
> If they then rent these houses out and keep them maintained I don't care that they own them...
Pension funds don't do that (it's a headache).
Instead, they allocate a certain amount of capital to funds specialized in Real Estate who will invest in real estate firms like Greystar who are forced to maximize revenue.
Much of the financialization people keep complaining about on HN is because institutional investors are now much more demanding in comparison to 40 years ago when institutional investing meant putting all your money in bonds and a bit of domestic stocks and hoping to get a 5-6% return.
Basically, the Yale, OTPPF, and ADIA model goes brrrrrrr as institutional investors now demand double digit returns.
Even if they are the leader in percentage point rent raises, and do it 5x as often as every other landlord? And blackball a renter they don't like, not from 1 specific house, but from 10K all at once?
This is something I’ve been seeing for a while. As a teen that kept his 300 dollar paycheck in cash that money would last a very long time. Now I make a good 6 figures and was seeing my accounts spending way more than I should. It wasn’t big purchases it was 50 dollars here 200 hundred there. A subscription here and there. By the end of the month I would wrack 8k in spending.
Going line by line I learned how much I neglected these transactions being the source of my problem. Could I afford it? Yes. But saving and investing is a better vehicle for retirement early than these minor dopamine hits
That's not extreme. They destroyed a piece of expensive critical infrastructure. Prison and seizure should be the bare minimum. I just mean it's not enough to prevent it in the future.
Why does the US consumer of said medications subsidize many other countries who have access to the same medications for a fraction of the US sticker price?
Lots of reasons. One of them is that other countries negotiate deals country wide and can get bulk discounts. The US does this with the VA and Medicare, and people using those services generally pay less than the rest of Americans. In the end, it is largely a policy choice, as having a single payer could get better negotiated deals on drugs.
Thanks for adding this information and yes this is exactly the point I was trying to make. Nationalized systems have better outcomes when they control the supply, demand, and pricing. If that doesn’t work manufacture it ourselves at a discount.
Bah! Begone with your socialist mumbo jumbo! Fox News Entertainent channel tells me about you communist and your “single payer” sham all the time! We have the best healthcare! Merica!
Do you believe that the deals they make are unprofitable given the discount? Do you think the other countries are keeping guns to their heads or what?
The discounts are there because they can be, not because other countries want to pay below the break-even price.
It is in the US where the drug companies can invest in the government just enough to recoup that with massive premiums in the convoluted medical system.
Nobody's forcing US pharama companies to sell to those countries at those prices, they choose to, because it makes them more money.
Foreigners aren't the reason American healthcare sucks. Stop looking for people to blame abroad, all the sources of your problems are in the presidency, congress, and in the boardroom that directs the former.
This is not like IT where the Americans are completely dominant and clearly superior.
The European pharma companies are doing more than fine, despite their main market being heavily regulated and price-controlled.
The less charitable explanation is that US companies want to charge outrageous prices, and the American system let them to, so they do it.
That's what the USA are: a machine to prioritize profits over people. Sometimes it turns out fine, like for the startup scene. Sometimes it's terrible, like when lives at stake.
There are a lot of bad health outcomes built into our society, yes, but by the time people are confronted with the health impacts of cars, agriculture subsidies, for-profit healthcare, etc. it is likely that drugs will be necessary to treat the very real, immediate problems which any given patient has. Reversing the subsidies for things like car-dependency would positively benefit millions of people but it’s a generational change, not something most individuals can do.
I agree about the significance of those large-scale changes; still ...
> Reversing the subsidies for things like car-dependency would positively benefit millions of people but it’s a generational change, not something most individuals can do.
Individuals frequently can chose to not use a car, of course. Still, it's not realistic for everyone or all the time, especially in a society built for automobile use.
> by the time people are confronted with the health impacts of cars, agriculture subsidies, for-profit healthcare, etc. it is likely that drugs will be necessary
My point is that there are other treatments for illness. I doubt it's a coincidence that this patentable technology is so relied on in a hyper-capitalist society; other countries with better health outcomes use far fewer pills, iirc. Who will fund the large-scale study that says a valuable pill is unnecessary?
> Individuals frequently can chose to not use a car, of course
To some extent, yes, but my point was that it’s not realistic for many people because we treat walkable neighborhoods like luxuries. If you wake up in your 40s with a bad back and cardio problems because you live in a suburb and drive everywhere, you can’t roll back the clock and build sidewalks, legalize density, or run decent transit and on average don’t have the money to move somewhere dramatically better.
I think a growing number of people, especially younger ones, realize this is unsustainable but it took generations to get here and it’ll take a while to change trajectories, too. If gas prices had stayed high in the seventies that might have gone differently but a huge percentage of American neighborhoods are designed to minimize physical activity and that’s often enforced by law.
That's what I meant by, it's not realistic for everyone and everywhere.
> I think a growing number of people, especially younger ones, realize this is unsustainable but it took generations to get here and it’ll take a while to change trajectories, too.
Urbanist movements, including walkable communities, are much older than this younger generation. I think within a certain segment - well-educated upper middle class, maybe - it's long had influence.
I think they need to bring those ideas to other segments of society, which they have a hard time doing.
I definitely don’t think that it’s new to the current young generation but I am optimistic that they might have enough political clout to actually make progress. My neighborhood narrowly avoided becoming a highway in the 60s so we have some older folks who have been fighting car culture since before I was born, but there were a lot of people who didn’t really care because it was more affordable in the past, but their kids are a lot more motivated because it’s so financially non-viable now.
In the United States, the other big factor was recognizing how much it wasn’t just car culture but racism driving things. Despite the current moment, I get the impression that a lot of people are more aware of how much avoiding sidewalks and transit was driven by racism and just hurt everyone.
>Maybe drugs, or these drugs, aren't the most efficient solutions. Shouldn't we direct resources toward more efficient ones?
Turns out all the low hanging fruit have already been picked, so the only "more efficient ones" left are stuff like gene therapy, which are absurdly expensive, but still theoretically cheaper than a lifetime of care. Unsurprisingly the high sticker price draws much backlash from the public and politicians.
> all the low hanging fruit have already been picked
What is that based on?
Also, I'm not talking about 'low hanging fruit' necessarily; only solutons that become cost effective for vendors if drug prices aren't so extreme.
There's reason to think there is low-hanging fruit: Research is incentivized for the most profitable solutions for the vendors, not the most cost-effective solutions for patients.
>Also, I'm not talking about 'low hanging fruit' necessarily; only solutons that become cost effective for vendors if drug prices aren't so extreme.
>There's reason to think there is low-hanging fruit: Research is incentivized for the most profitable solutions for the vendors, not the most cost-effective solutions for patients.
High drug prices also mean you can charge more for one-off cures. See, the gene therapy example above.
US voters have no principles. Even republicans started artistically screaming about nationalizing companies when they didn’t want to play ball with the president.
I'm assuming you're European and just want to make an "America bad" post because this is comically ignorant. There wouldn't be mountains of federal code to adhere to if that was the case.
This is a trope among populists: pass legislation around <thing>, observe consequences of doing so, blame the "free market", repeat.
Sure, but that article literally contradicts your original point about Americans wanting a "free market" as it lists the complicated nature of existing laws, Medicare, PBMs etc. and the incentives those create.
You could just say "Americans need to vote better and cleanup their laws around this" and yes, that would be ideal, but I don't see that happening anytime soon. It's part of why some want the government to not involve themselves at all: no matter how good the politicians you elect, others can come into office and fuck it all up while everyone is forced to deal with it because they have the monopoly on violence. Not to mention the glacial pace at which our legislative bodies move.
> US voters prefer the free market as opposed to government regulation and nationalized healthcare.
Because US voters are dumb. (Just for context, I'm a US citizen).
Free markets don't work when there is inelastic demand for a good or service, and an awful lot of health care (unless you consider 'well, guess I'll just die then' as a reasonable outcome) is inelastic demand.
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