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sol_remmy2

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For what it’s worth, none of my friends put infants in daycare due to the cost. They either got foreign au pairs or hired someone under the table for cash (very common in immigrant communities)

I'm hoping your friends are libertarians who disagree with the current political zeitgeist in Massachusetts.

It would be very depressing to hear that your friends are Liberals who publicly support these daycare laws and then privately flaunt them by 1) favoring non-American workers and 2) paying them in cash to avoid taxes

The US gov't largely believes itself is ineffective and needs to be privatized and ran like a business. Private businesses are held up as beacons of innovation and efficiency without the "red tape" the gov't has due to purposefully created checks, balances and regulations.

The medical system is really not private. It is a hybrid of a state-controlled system and a capitalistic system. Here are some ways of how the system is state-controlled:

1. Hospitals cannot be freely constructed. One must apply for a "certificate of need" to gain permission from the government to build a hospital. This is not a free market.

2. Credentialism is BAD in our medical system. There is only one group of people approved by the government to do prescribe most medications and perform most surgeries - doctors. This is not a free market and greatly increase costs. Doctors earn a median of 300k/year and are the highest paid profession in every state. This is not a free market.

3. Hospitals are legally forced to treat anyone who shows up at their door - even if they can't afford the treatment. This is not a free market.

4. Medicare/Medicaid are forced to nearly buy any drug, regardless of cost, if it could save a live. Even if a drug is 500k/year, the system is forced to buy it. This is not a free market and greatly increases costs.

America should not be compared to a country like Sweden. It should be compared to other giant multi-ethnic countries like Brazil or India or maybe the UK.

Also in America, states are given the freedom to create (some) of their own laws. So one state might be okay sealing records after 2 years, another state might prefer to wait 10 years. IMO this is superior to a "one size fits all" approach.

A lot of divisions in America are driven by generations of policy based on racism - from redlining, white flight and zoning policies that changed the structure of cities and are now used as weapons against newcomers and change, to the very existence of many cities and governments that were created in order to be a separate white space from the larger cities nearby, and the use of these boundaries to avoid funding the basics of society for everyone (school districts, libraries, roads, etc)

I've got some bad news: when you solve racism, these problems will still exist. Because the elites will never want to live nearby poor people and zoning laws ensure they don't have to

Disagree, the most monopolistic sectors in the economy (education, telecommunications, health care) are also the most highly regulated.

Some states don't even have charter schools, can you believe that?? They only have one choice for schooling from grade K-12

Have you seen the weird articles on Snapchat Discover? "Why I'm never taking my mom to an x-rated convention again" "How my kitten play fetish makes me feel less alone" "Why I've been dressing like a horse for twenty years"

If I had a teenage daughter, I'd feel much more comfortable with her using the Chinese tik-tok than whatever tabloid-level trash Snapchat is pushing these days. Some of these American media companies have just gotten weird

In America speech is censored by American private companies all the time. Racial or anti-semitic speech is often censored thanks for pressure from civil rights groups (i.e. https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/facebook-bans-white-n...) and from lawsuits (i.e. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-47705904)

Twitter has even begun censoring political speech from public figures: "Twitter will now hide — but not remove — harmful tweets from public figures" (https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/27/18761132/twitter-donald-t...)

Myself and many of my friends who have decided to have zero children or only one child rather late in life ... So, how do you address that issue? Telling people to just suck it up and accept childbearing as their duty isn’t going to work.

What I predict will happen: Government will reduce pension and social security payments to those that did not support the system by having 2 or more well-raised children.

you don't choose to get sick and fall into medical debt -- but capitalism underpins the health system that induces that medical debt (which is a major contributor to poverty [0].)

The medical system not a free market. It is a hybrid of a state-controlled system and a capitalistic system. Here are some ways of how the system is state-controlled:

1. Hospitals cannot be freely constructed. One must apply for a "certificate of need" to gain permission from the government to build a hospital. This is not a free market.

2. Credentialism is BAD in our medical system. There is only one group of people approved by the government to do prescribe most medications and perform most surgeries - doctors. This is not a free market and greatly increase costs. Doctors earn a median of 300k/year and are the highest paid profession in every state. This is not a free market.

3. Hospitals are legally forced to treat anyone who shows up at their door - even if they can't afford the treatment. This is not a free market.

4. Medicare/Medicaid are forced to nearly buy any drug, regardless of cost, if it could save a live. Even if a drug is 500k/year, the system is forced to buy it. This is not a free market and greatly increases costs.

This is a surprisingly common take on the literature, with an unlikely consensus among both the conservative and radical left, libertarians and conservative libertarians, and even many on the conservative side.

I hate asking but mind citing some sources?

Economic consensus is that labor pool operates on supply/demand, so greatly increase the supply through immigration will reduce demand and therefore reduce salaries. This part of the reason for why doctors have such high salaries: their supply is limited because only X number of people can become doctors each year and demand is very high.

Saying that an increased supply of workers does not affect highly commoditized jobs like cooks and construction works is an unusual claim and I would appreciate a source so i can review their arguments.

Don't you realize most people don't have the patience or ability to be a software engineer? That it is one of the most intellectually demanding jobs in society? And that 4 years computer science education is both expensive and difficult? Recognize your privilige - you are very smart and, for you, programming is easy. You are in the minority.

How about dental hygienists? Dental Hygienists made a median salary of $74,070 (2017). https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/dental-hygienist/... That's a very easy job that only requires 2 years of training. Shouldn't they be paid less so teachers can be paid more?

Where do you work? I'm in operations and spent 10pm-3am last night responding to an incident. There's a lady here going bald in her early 30s. Stress is high, responsibility is high, accountability is high, effort is high.

I can think of literally 1000s of jobs that are easier

The WeWork IPO 7 years ago

I'm not sure why you're trying to draw a connection between stock buybacks and QE when there isn't one.

Stock buybacks are just tax-optimized dividends.

Luck has absolutely nothing to do with it. If you attribute America industrializing before China/India as luck, then I will lose trust in anything else you say.

By 1915 America had higher GDP per capita than most of Western Europe - BEFORE WW1. Western Europe had higher GDP per capita than China/India by like 1200 AD. You are so so far off the mark.

Also, India's population only started exponentially growing in the late 1800s. By that point America had already industralized and was already the richest.

Go ahead and put your money where you mouth is, sell all of your US stock, and invest in African stocks since population growth is apparently the only thing that matters.

Those stats count an immigrant from any neighboring Western European country as foreign born. That makes them highly misleading compared to the US. In the US, a person from a different state does not count as an immigrant.