Your IP address is revealed when you use a torrent, which opens you up to criminal prosecution. Running Bittorrent over Tor is also slow, and tends to overwhelm the volunteer run network. And someone also has to pay for the bandwidth, hardware, and sysadmin time to scan, upload, host.
Incentivized onion routing networks like the Oxen network or Nym offer the potential for fast, anonymous filesharing, while decentralized storage networks like Sia or Filecoin could act as censorship resistant repositories.
Compare someone from Venezuela and North Korea. Millions of people managed to leave Venezuela and stay alive, unlike millions of people from North Korea who had died from hunger in 90s despite having neighbours ready to take care of them.
But if you think that there is nowhere to go, you need to support seasteading, because if it succeeds there will be many new countries that will be happy to take new citizens.
Price discovery is indeed difficult in the current market. However, the current healthcare market is no where close to a free market.
For example, suppose you wanted to start a hospital that offered price transparency, like the Surgery Center of Oklahoma does. (1)
In thirty-five states and the District of Columbia, you'd first have to acquire a certificate-of-need (CON) from the state healthcare regulators.
In order to get certificate of need, you must prove that the community “needs” the new or expanded service, and existing providers are invited to challenge your application.
Existing hospitals typically don't want new competitors taking away their patients, so they vigorously fight to prevent new CON's from being issued.
For example, Dr. Mark Monteferrante wanted to buy a second MRI machine for his radiology practice in 2003. But it took five years and more than $175,000 in fees to get the certificate. (2)
And conlaws are just one example of perverse effects of state intervention into the healthcare market, from state laws restricting insurance competition, to severe restrictions on new entrants to the medical labor market, to drug monopolies.
Price discovery requires pricing some people out of the market. Period. There is no "free market" healthcare system that can or ever will deliver required health services to everyone.
Furthermore when the alternative is death or debilitation, the price a "consumer" is willing to pay is effectively everything they possess and can borrow. That is both a massive distortion and non-optimal for the economy as a whole.
There are certainly regulatory inefficiencies and other inefficiencies in healthcare markets, but a truly "free market" in healthcare not morally justifiable.
> Price discovery requires pricing some people out of the market. Period. There is no "free market" healthcare system that can or ever will deliver required health services to everyone.
There is no economic system that can deliver all of the health care to everyone who wants it.
Fundamentally, health care resources are limited: doctors, beds, MRI machines, etc.
Desire for health care is much less limited.
The question is not whether to give everyone what they want, but instead how to imperfectly ration what we have.
We are overspending on the quality of health care we get today. Further there is a lot of fear mongering about socialized medicine.
I've experienced medicine in both the UK and the US. I can tell you, there isn't a difference in quality. Further, when I got a cold and went in, wait time wasn't 6 hours or whatever other BS people claim. Wait time was ~10 minutes. In fact, the time to see a doctor in the US is almost always longer. Why? Because half the time you have to fill out forms and provide proof of insurance and a whole host of other information for them before they will put you on the waiting list.
What did I have to fill out to see a doc in the UK? A card that had my name and current address. Even that, they told me, was optional.
Cheaper medicine for less money is a reality. The only people that lose with socialized medicine are admin and insurance. Everyone else in the nation wins.
I've had different experiences from you. My experience in the UK was wait 90 minutes in a waiting room and when it was finally close to my turn I was told I could only see a nurse and she wasn't allowed to proscribe any medicine so if I wanted to see a doctor I should go down the street to the private doctor. This was in London near Soho.
In Japan the first time I went to a doctor it was for stomach pain. He gave me on ultrasound and declared I had hepatitis. My personel department at my company decided to take me to another doctor. Had to weight 2.5 hours in a room with around 250 other sick people. Was finally told I had food poisoning.
I am not defending the USA system but both the UK system and the Japanese system have issues as well. I've spent the most time in the Japanese system. What I like is it's easy to see a doctor and relatively cheap. Prices are apparently set by the government. Conversely a large percentage of Japanese doctors are quacks and would be unqualified to practice in the USA. It's a common topic of conversation for foreigners here to tell their horror stories of all the crazy experiences they've had with doctors here. Also, top doctors, or rather surgeons are known to require bribes in the $XXXX-$XXXXX range beyond the decided on fees.
I’ve had to wait 3 hours in an ER in America - also have had to drop providers because they only had appointments weeks out.
The decision to go to a doctor is a financial one in the US, sometimes superceding a health one. Our life expectancy is dropping as well. It’s a broken system and adding more of what is broken about it won’t work, if the goal is for society to be healthy.
The UK system isn't amazing, unless you're evidently having an "emergency", you can be waiting for hours (once waited for 4 hours with a broken wrist for example) - that being said, the triage is pretty solid and you'll cycle through intermediate steps in the meantime.
I think the best part is not having the mental burden of potentially going bankrupt afterwards...
There are severe problems with the English NHS, but we need to remember that it costs the tax payer a lot less than the US system.
That's the thing I don't understand: they pay more in tax, and they pay more in insurance, and they don't get universal coverage and have worse outcomes across a range of measures.
Was this with your GP or did you just turn up at the A&E with minor ailments - turning up at the A&E with something you should be seeing a GP with will mean you got the back of the queue.
I have never had a problem getting a appointment to see my GP.
> In Japan the first time I went to a doctor it was for stomach pain. He gave me on ultrasound and declared I had hepatitis.
Ultrasound? That is absurd.
I can't speak for UK/US/Japan but in India situation is quite similar. Opaque pricing along with quacks (or maybe genuine doctors) out to milk as much as they can, especially if they know that you have insurance.
A colleague of mine who had stomach pain was told that he had to get his appendix removed. When he refused the doctor actually threatened him with a write-up to ensure that he doesn't receive any insurance money. After the company got involved he was moved to another hospital, only to be told that he had stomach gas.
When were you in the UK system? I've noticed a lot of variance between people's opinions based on the fact that there's been a sort of sabotage campaign against the NHS in recent years (it's dropped ten places in the worldwide healthcare rankings in the last five years). So people that had experiences with the UK system in the early 2000's generally had a good time, whereas later, it became a lot more mixed.
Assuming you are not an EU citizen, you are don't get free healthcare in the UK anyway. They probably told you to go to the private doctor because if you are non-EU you would have health insurance which would cover this no?
That's not how this works. If you are from outside of EU you are not limited to private doctors and hospitals - you can still go and be seen by any NHS doctor, but you have to disclose the fact that you are not covered by national insurance - they will simply ask you for personal details and send you the bill few weeks later(well, if it's worth if - if you're only seeing a doctor about a cold or a broken wrist they will not even bill you anything because it's not worth the time spent filling out documentation, and pretty much no hospital even has a billing department).
> I've experienced medicine in both the UK and the US. I can tell you, there isn't a difference in quality.
My experience was very different. In January-February this year I had to visit (unfortunately) both the Emergency Room in NYC and the A&E in London. While the quality of the medical equipment in London matches the one in NYC, the understaffing is much more severe. In neither place was my wait time only 10 minutes, but in NYC I had to wait for about 1 hour (including paperwork), while in London for about 6 hours.
I talked with other people in London about my experience that the medical system is severely understaffed, and all agreed. On the plus side, I did not have to pay anything in the UK (they didn't even care that I was not a UK resident). In the US I had to pay north of $1000, despite having insurance.
My Girlfriend managed to stick her finger in a blender in January. We went to a London hospital, got seen by a doctor within 1 hour (she had stitches within 20 minutes of arriving) and she had plastic surgery on her finger that evening. For free.
Different A&E departments have different problems. The NHS is the largest employer in Europe, and it's reductive to say "all London hospitals are understaffed". They are not. Part of the problem is seasonal and even daily shifts in A&E visits, you can't staff for the worst case all the time. And January/Feb is known to be a busy couple of months.
In Boston I recently had to wait in an emergency room for 5 hours with multiple broken bones. This was at one of the best rated hospitals in the country.
I recently moved to a new state and I’m trying to get set up with a new primary care provider. I’ve been trying to get an appointment for six months, but they keep bumping my appointment back. Did I mention that I had to settle for a nurse because none of the doctors in my area are accepting new patients?
This weekend I was feeling incredibly sick and there were ketones in my urine (potentially deadly for me). We got there at 9p.m and weren't seen until 2a.m. They stuck us in the room where they keep patients with potential mental health issues because they were so full so I didn't even have access to a charging outlet. We have good insurance. The US healthcare system is often times just as understaffed. Both can be terrible experiences but one can potentially bankrupt me.
>> I talked with other people in London about my experience that the medical system is severely understaffed, and all agreed.
That is because NHS spending is being slashed viciously. Obviously, if socialised medicine is being dismantled, it can't be expected to work all that well anymore.
Insurance is complicated in the US in no small part because of government intervention.
Starting with the fact that employers pick insurance plans for their employees, eliminating enormous market power: and this happens because the government doesn't tax the money that is spent on insurance plans.
Why did you go to a doctor for a cold? That seems to be a problem. You send someone to school for 10 years and they spend their time talking to patients about a runny nose due to a common cold. And for what? To write a prescription?
For a cold, just wait a week or two. There's nothing medicine can do for you anyway. If it's still there, then it's worth checking. Also, you shouldn't need a sick note unless you are off for more than a week (your legislative framework may vary).
It depends entirely on the employer. Some places will require a doctors note if you miss more than two shifts. So in places like that, people typically go to work sick, and just spread the disease. This includes most fast food restaurants so think about the implications of that.
I wondered the same thing. My mother was a registered nurse who rarely ever took us to a Dr unless we were very sick for several days. For colds she simply treated the symptoms. If we had a fever it meant bed rest and sipping 7-Up to help settle the stomach. The only time she took me was for ear infections and tonsillitis.
That assumes that the desire for health care is unbounded like other consumables.
In reality most healthy individuals want a limited amount of care, sick individuals want the least amount of care required to return them to health - and there are fundamental limits on the amount of care that can be provided to those who are beyond the help of current technology.
As such you would expect a finite level of demand from the economy as a whole if everyone was allowed as much healthcare as they desired. Any attempt at rationing care will both reduce efficiency, and constrain supply - driving up prices. The most market oriented system would leave supply unconstrained and provide universal and automatic coverage allowing more suppliers to enter the market until supply outstrips demand and "prices" naturally fall.
No, the demand for healthcare is basically infinite.
I got a cold yesterday with a crazy bad sore throat, I thought of maybe popping into the doctor. But it turns out to be just a regular cold. My mother would have 100% gone to the doctor. The clinics here in Canada are chock full of kids with the flu and people coming in 'because'. Maybe that's beneficial due to the risk 'it could be something bad'. Or maybe the economics don't make sense i.e. for really mundane things it's better to just stay home and take Tylenol.
But the demand is super high. Once people cross 50, there are always problems. Always something. And it's all expensive.
That’s finite demand as the effort of going to the doctor is non zero. People in good heath are not going to waste their time.
Assuming the average doctor’s visit is 15 minutes and the average person goes to the doctor every month. That’s only 1 GP per 640 people. After that point they might send you to a specialist some fraction of the time, but it’s still finite.
Consider dental insurance is ~15$ a month and most people go to the dentist twice a year. That’s about what GP side of heathcare costs. It’s the care after that point from people with actual issues that gets expensive. Yet, without the vast overhead of insurance you cut the costs of providing actual heath in half. Which more than covers the costs from people that are currently turned away.
PS: And yes billing is ~50% of current US costs when you include Doctor time dealing with paperwork. Remember the entire insurance industry and their profit is pure added cost, but so is the medical billing people inside each provider.
> Maybe that's beneficial due to the risk 'it could be something bad'.
I would assume it's detrimental because it results in doctors' waiting rooms full of people with colds (making it a dangerous place for anyone who is immunosupressed and really needs to see the doctor).
The problem in the US is that you can't just go get your throat swabbed for a strep test in that situation. That could take 5 minutes and cost less than $50, but nope.
Are you saying that the richest country in the world can't accomplish something that already exists in plain view in some of the poorest countries in the world?
There is no country on earth that gives people all the healthcare they might want with no limits and that is not what we should be aiming for. There are many that give people enough healthcare and that is what we should be aiming for.
You really should get the facts on how those systems actually operate.
I'm currently living in an european country that has a national health service that supposedly ticks all the socialist talking points, including free (in theory) access to emergency care, but not only is the service largely inoperational with year-long waiting periods for surgeries, including cancer treatments, but also has a disgruntle workforce who systematically complains they are underpaid and overworked.
The situation is so appalingly bad that the national health service even routes patients to private hospitals and clinics, ending up paying a hefty bill for the services they were supposed to provide in-house but are largely unable to provide.
While I understand your point, I don't know if it could be distilled that succinctly. I have friends who have worked in European countries with universal healthcare that was sub-standard by a U.S. perspective. What I'm curious about is whether this is directly attributable to the healthcare system structure or if it's more causally related to other factors like GDP, access to a trained workforce, or basic infrastructure. Meaning, if we look at two very similar countries that happen to have different healthcare systems would the same effect you outlined still hold?
While I also come from a country like the one you described, there is a very simple fact that cannot be ignored - when my dad got cancer 8 years ago, every single one of his operations and all the drugs(including incredibly expensive Glivec) were 100% free. He was even reimbursed for the cost of travelling to the hospital for his monthly check-up.
If he had the same disease in US, he would die much earlier than he did, I'm 100% certain of it, because quite simply there is no way he could afford the treatment or the premiums that americans are paying for their healthcare. Even when he was sick enough that he couldn't work anymore, he was still 100% covered and didn't have to pay anything for anything ever.
My point is - there are people in our countries who are probably dying because they have to wait months to be seen by someone. True. But there are also people in US who are dying because they cannot afford the treatment they need. I feel like this is far worse than the first situation - after all, we only have a finite number of doctors, a finite amount of hospitals, and limited capacity to add more(for reasons other than financial too). But US is the richest country in the world - and its citizens die because they cannot afford cancer drugs? That's abhorrent.
You have gone from a hypothetical to concluding that people in the US die because they can't afford cancer drugs.
If your dad was over 65, he would be on Medicare. If he was younger than 65 and impoverished (income between 0 - ~150% of poverty level) he would be on Medicaid or another state plan for low income people. If he's above 150% of poverty level he probably has health insurance available at work or thru ACA. In fact is legally obligated to.
It's entirely possible to have health coverage and still be financially ruined by a health emergency due to deductibles and pre-existing condition loopholes.
Medical expenses, unlike credit card debt or student loans, can still be discharged through bankruptcy. For lower income elderly folks, that coupled with low paying job opportunities usually leads to disaster.
> Furthermore when the alternative is death or debilitation, the price a "consumer" is willing to pay is effectively everything they possess and can borrow.
This is also true with food. What keeps the price down is competition, not price controls.
so when I get into a car accident and am bleeding internally, I can march down the street to the next hospital if I think the bill at the one I'm at is too high?
No; but suppose we agree that emergency response services (fire, medical, police) should be state-run. The goal of such state-run ER is to get you as quickly as possible to a hospital, where care can be provided. The state can then shop around for the cheapest/best private provider for each catchment area. One could also make a case that the state should pay for this emergency care out of tax money - unless the state can show that you were the one responsible (e.g. if you end up in a hospital because of excessive drinking on a night out - taxpayers should not have to pay for you in this case).
But such true emergency response seems like actually a very minor part of all medical care. It would be better for people to have private emergency arrangements through their insurance - but, of course, this is not always viable (if you are bleeding out in a car accident, there is no time to figure out which hospital you have a deal with), so that is one area where the state should probably be involved.
Does it have an end goal of maximizing profits, though? Couldn't the goal of price discovery be to find the point where supply = demand, without necessarily maximizing profit?
Granted, this ignores the human trait to increase consumption when removed from directly paying all associated costs (e.g., my behavior at Golden Corral)
Doesn't that imply they compound profits by either 1) raising prices and thus reducing demand for their product in the presence of non-profit maximizing suppliers or 2) creating efficiencies to increase profit margin at an equal-or-lower price?
In situation one wouldn't the advantage go to the non-profit motivated supplier and in situation 2) doesn't it ultimately benefit the customer with lower prices?
I think the point is if one company is making outrageous profits it’s trivial for a competitor to undercut them. The food industry for example rarely makes more than 2% in profit because it is so competitive.
I would agree, but only with industries with a low barrier of entry of commodity businesses. There are also other moats that prevent trivial competition. Examples may be intellectual property, branding, switching costs etc.
I see your point if the term profit is defined in a general sense, but with the exception of "corporations as people" caveat there's plenty of everyday examples where people are trying to maximize outcomes other than capital (sometimes at the expense of capital). I'm not sure that makes it any less of a free market
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.
You illustrate the point well and maybe I'm just not well versed enough in the topic. You imply that a charity warps the free market by undercutting profit-motivated competitors but in the last statement you give the vendors the freedom of choice in regards to their customers. Is there any reason why this same freedom of choice can't be extended to people who choose a specific social outcome at the cost of less (or nil) profit? For example, are B-Corps fundamentally less "free market"? Or does the very nature of free market imply a profit maximizing function? As an example that comes to mind, I'm curious how not-for-profit and for-profit hospitals interact in a "free market" of healthcare in the United States.
> Furthermore when the alternative is death or debilitation, the price a "consumer" is willing to pay is effectively everything they possess and can borrow
Someone is morbidly obese. They will die and are already debilitated. The cost of having their life back is eating less. Many are not willing to pay that price.
No, a well working competitive market reaches a price where marginal revenue equals marginal cost. Unless you are using an unorthodox version of microeconomics.
> There are certainly regulatory inefficiencies and other inefficiencies in healthcare markets, but a truly "free market" in healthcare not morally justifiable
Socialized healthcare has its own "immoral" trade-offs. We essentially reduce per capita quality in favor of all-inclusive coverage. Proponents of free-market healthcare would argue that the inefficient allocation of resources inherent to socialization is immoral. Libertarians would argue that forcing money from one person to give to another for medical care is immoral. It's not really a question of morality, more of preferred philosophy and practicality. Framing it around morality makes the other side seem abhorrent and the situation difficult to find common ground.
> Socialized healthcare has its own "immoral" trade-offs. We essentially reduce per capita quality in favor of all-inclusive coverage
That's a false dichotomy; there are many mixed systems where the government provides a baseline level of care with private insurance providing additional services or benefits (eg: government covers a shared hospital room, private insurance covers a private room).
>Libertarians would argue that forcing money from one person to give to another for medical care is immoral
True libertarians also argue that all taxation is theft (if they're purists anyway), making road construction immoral.
> Framing it around morality makes the other side seem abhorrent and the situation difficult to find common ground.
A "free market" in healthcare requires us to condemn people to death or debilitating injury when they cannot afford care. Unlike nearly every other area, this one literally involves life and death so I believe it must meet a different standard than other activity (economic or otherwise).
> True libertarians also argue that all taxation is theft (if they're purists anyway), making road construction immoral.
No, it doesn't make road construction immoral in the eyes of libertarians. It makes taking money from other people, by force, in order to build a road, immoral. People are totally free to build roads privately and pay for it themselves, and even band together to build these roads.
(Part of where the standard libertarian argument falls apart, in my eyes, is that government in many ways really is just a scaled up version of "people banding together to build a road". There are there are legitimate moral/philosophical questions around opt-in vs. opt-out though).
> Part of where the standard libertarian argument falls apart, in my eyes, is that government in many ways really is just a scaled up version of "people banding together to build a road".
There is a significant qualitative difference in that "people banding together to build a road" is an entirely voluntary activity, whereas government is nothing of the kind. It's not merely a matter of "opt-in vs. opt-out". Even in an opt-out system one can choose not to participate without penalty, but if you inform a government that you're choosing to "opt out" they won't just leave you alone to live as you please. They draw their arbitrary lines on a map and consider everything within those lines to fall under their control. Even if you move halfway around the world and renounce your citizenship, and in doing so cut off all ties to everyone and everything you once knew, you may find that they still claim a share of your income to pay for that road you'll never be able to use.
The "scaled-up" version of "people banding together to build a road" is a co-op or corporation. Such an organization does not have the power to tax or to impose regulations on anyone who doesn't explicitly and voluntarily agree to them.
> True libertarians also argue that all taxation is theft (if
> they're purists anyway), making road construction immoral.
Why would you call those people "true" libertarians? There are a lot of people who consider themselves libertarians of various sorts who strongly disagree with this. Some consider property to be theft.
There are many kinds of libertarianism, and the American-style extreme capitalist libertarianism is not the only one, and probably one of the most irrational forms of libertarianism.
Personally, I feel providing essential care to everybody equally does the most to free people from oppression and extortion by those who wield power over them at a time when they're vulnerable.
Kudos to Kapwing for being attentive to their employee's family and emotional lives. However, it's irritating that parents receive perks at the expense of single and childfree employees (who don't get weeks of time off for _their_ families, and who are expected to cover for the parents on leave). IMHO, all employees should get the same amount of time off, regardless of whether or not they have children.
> who don't get weeks of time off for _their_ families, and who are expected to cover for the parents on leave
I'd be all for policies that supported caring for an ailing spouse or parent also. But let me tell you, taking care of a new baby is about as far from "time off" as it's possible to get. It's hard, stressful work, and if you discourage paternity leave or imply that it's equivalent to vacation time, you're implying that it's womens' work.
Would "time away" be better do you think. I mean they are "off of work" as in not at their job.
If you took some time off to do something else equally taxing I would normally refer to it as time off, probably with a caveat in day to day situations, just like if they were on parental leave.
Thinking about it I probably wouldn't if someone was taking time away from work for reserves work (military, fire service, etc).
I suppose "time away" would work, but that's basically what we mean by "leave" as well. What got my dander up was the implication that me taking leave to be with my spouse and infant child (which I did not get the opportunity to do) is the same as vacation time.
I agree that raising children is taxing. However, the mere fact that you _chose_ to do an activity that is taxing does not, to my mind, entitle you to impose costs on your fellow employees. Volunteering for the Peace Corp is taxing, caring for elderly parents is taxing, climbing Mt. Everest is taxing. Yet, alone of all those activities, parents think they deserve to be subsidized.
Only those having children are choosing a taxing activity that essentially everyone who hopes to retire is depending on, since—public or private, defined benefit or defined contribution—virtually every retirement option relies on the economic activity of generations after those of the retiree.
You're suggesting that parents are some kind of limited special-interest class, as if we're snowboarders asking for powder leave, rather than the overwhelming majority of people. The question of how we treat parents is really a question of how we all want to treat each other -- whether we want to give people support when their children are born, or whether we would prefer to force them to choose between work and family. Furthermore, since this is a discussion about paternity in particular, speaking out against paternity leave is speaking out against women working outside the home. I regard this as a very regressive position and unjust to women.
> IMHO, all employees should get the same amount of time off, regardless of whether or not they have children.
Parents get more time off than non-parents and that's unfair? That's an understandable perspective but here's another one.
1) Children don't get to choose whether to be born. Infants and post-partum women are vulnerable people and giving parents time off helps protect these vulnerable people. Looking at this from the perspective of what's best for the child it's clear that paternal leave is very important.
2) People have a choice of where to work and at least in the US, employers are free to choose compensation that they feel will attract the workers they want. I know several people who have chosen where to work based on paternal leave policies.
3) Life is unfair. If I made a list of injustices in the world an infant spending a few extra weeks with daddy isn't even in the first 1000.
Re:
1) But parents decide to have children, and they have the responsibility for caring for those "vulnerable people". I'm not saying they don't need more time, but to say they've been put into some untenable situation that must be dealt with by everyone else is absurd. There's never been more access to birth control or knowledge about the reproductive process. There's never been a point in the world where there was less space for another child. Looking from at this from the perspective of what's best for children, having a child is selfish. Adoption doesn't add people to the world and would decrease overall suffering assuming you're a better parent than the foster system.
2) This is recently becoming a national issue, as it well should be. There needs to be a mechanism in place to protect the employees surrounding parental leave if it's going to be enshrined in national law. I don't think you can make the argument that businesses don't have a history of pushing the costs of regulation onto their employees when possible.
3) By that argument bringing up parental leave at all is a completely moot point. We have nearly 438,000 children in the foster system.[0] 45% of all child deaths are from malnutrition.[1] If I made a list of injustices in the world, a parent being unable to spend every waking moment with their child for a couple months isn't even in the first 1,000.
What's the difference between a woman with an unplanned pregnancy and a woman with another type of unanticipated medical condition that would qualify her for medical leave?
>There's never been more access to birth control or knowledge about the reproductive process.
There's never been more access to knowledge about nutrition and preventative health, and yet diabetes and other lifestyle diseases are at all time highs. The US now spends >$200/billion annually on diabetes alone. As a matter of public healthy policy, should we be able to hold people with medical diseases or conditions more accountable based on how much public health information is available?
"unplanned" Does this women not know how sex works? Does she lack access to IUD's, condoms, abortions? There are rare instances where women have a child against their will, but the number is vanishly small. The vast majority of children are carefully planned _choices_.
The "Medical leave" portion of the time off is covered under completely different laws, so I'm not sure which portion of what I've said you're replying to.
No one is being sent back to work without medical leave from their attending physician, who is charged with determining when the mother is healthy enough to go home and can go back to work. I absolutely do not, under any circumstances, believe in any being or institution ever getting between a mother and her doctor's right to determine what is medically best for her and her child. That is essentially what society was built to protect.
1) Should children suffer the mistakes of their parents? It's a question of values.
2) I don't follow what you're trying to say here? If the fed. govt. mandates paternity leave the unfairness will be a bigger issue? Sure but right now FMLA is the law and it allows unpaid leave to care for family.
3) I agree it's moot but I didn't bring up paternity leave, the grandparent did.
It's a benefit for the children, not the parents. Because everybody gets to be a child exactly once, everybody benefits equally.
That includes you. You can be gay or a Catholic priest, and you benefit.
Ignoring the fact that you had no choice and that benefits may have been different back when you were born, it isn't fair for you to take these benefits as a child and then deny them to the next generation.
No. Having children is, well, literally the activity most essential to the survival of society and our species itself. Of course people should get extra time off to do it.
The problem isn't that we have too many natalist incentives. The problem is that we don't have enough of them! The replacement rate is below replacement in general, and it's worse in cities.
If children, fine. But I don't begrudge people who do.
I don't begrudge people having children. If you want to have more children--and pay for them with your own time and money--more power to you.
What I begrudge is being forced to donate _my_ time and money to subsidizing those who have children, at the expense of the things that _I_ value. Subsidizing the creation of the 385,001th child born today is quite low on the things that I would spend money on given the choice. I would rather spend that money on anti-aging research, or prison reform, or a new startup. And if I were inclined to give money to help children, I wouldn't give it to the relatively wealthy parents of children in the US, but to the children of parents who make less than $2/day.
That suggests that "more people" is an unmitigated good, which I don't believe. There has never been a time when you were more able to avoid unplanned childbirth. The number of children in foster care has been increasing since 2013.[0]Whatever good could be done by having a child could be done better by acknowledging some of the people already in this world and giving them a real shot. We're all responsible for any situation that becomes a "tragedy of the commons", and we need to start behaving like it.
There's nothing wrong with wanting your kids to be your own, nor with the desire to ensure that part of you makes it to the next generation. I'm sick of anti-humanism backlash against doing the thing that every organism ultimately exists to do.
Considering humans are the demonstrated reason for climate change, I'd argue some anti-human sentiment is a bit overdue. Nature's going to be fine. Life will recover once we're gone. It's us humans that are going to suffer because of our humanist entitlement.
The idea that some environmenal metric is more important than human suffering is bizarre and vaguely masochistic. The environment is an instrumental good for humanity's use, not a legitimate moral object in itself. Human extinction is a maximally bad scenario no matter how well the environment does afterwards
Society has decided that having children is important, and individuals, companies, and governments encourage that activity by providing benefits like these.
Would OP be envious of someone's leave while they were battling cancer? Benefits exist because we have collectively decided they increase quality of life.
Not everyone will have children, but that are necessary for a vibrant, healthy economy (in the long term) and to provide societal continuance. Therefore, the benefit provided to parents is valuable, both to the parents and to society.
Honestly I had the same initial reaction. It’s kind of like sick leave: people who get sick a lot use it and people who are healthy cannot. Perversely incentivizes getting sick. The alternative is “paid time off” which can be used if you’re sick or for vacation. Unfortunately this means you can blow half your vacation time for the year by getting a cold that lasts a week.
Just provide more time off to everyone and don’t bucket it into specific purposes. Why does your employer need to know whether you’re using your allotted time off for vacation, taking care of a kid, or due to illness? I’d argue it’s none of the employer’s business.
This is a stretch, since "getting sick" isn't generally something one controls directly. At most, it could incentivize illness-risking behavior. However, even then, to be an incentive, the benefit of paid leave combined with being sick during that leave would have to be more attractive than being healthy and working, which is not a foregone conclusion.
Instead, lacking distinct sick leave perversely incentivizes getting coworkers sick (in situations that a sickness is contagious and workers are co-located). Rather, it incentivizes the risky behavior, where the risk is borne by everyone else and, by extension, the employer.
If there's one thing I've learned in my 45 years, it's that actually no one has figured yet what the term "intrinsic value" really means. The more you dig into that term it just ends up meaning "what someone else is willing to pay for it" blended together with some fuzzy subjective notions of morality.
> In The Theory of Investment Value, written over 50 years ago,
John Burr Williams set forth the equation for value, which we
condense here: The value of any stock, bond or business today is
determined by the cash inflows and outflows - discounted at an
appropriate interest rate - that can be expected to occur during
the remaining life of the asset.
