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Comment by emilecantin | Hacker News Reader

> No one is sitting on a pile of apartments, or ventilators, or college spots, or food distribution capacity.

The large number of empty apartments being rented 3-4 nights a month on AirBnb in most large cities seems to indicate otherwise.

The CPAP machine "jailbreak" posted here yesterday seems to indicate otherwise.

The large quantity of food going to the trash every day seems to indicate otherwise.

I agree that there is a "fixed" amount of stuff out there, but it's far from allocated efficiently. I think it's time we recognized that.

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> The large quantity of food going to the trash every day seems to indicate otherwise.

These are all kind of bad examples, but I'll go with this one. Food takes time to grow or produce, so you have to accurately predict months out how much food you can sell. So, who is to blame for imperfect predictions of future demand? We could donate all this food instead of just binning it, so then who's to blame for not building the mass infrastructure required to coordinate such distribution, and then running it all for free? And then if such an individual did do this, why didn't they spend their considerable resources instead on a project that could have benefited humanity way more?

I mean, you realize this is a catch-22 argument right?

We don't want the government doing anything in our lives, so we don't expect any sort of mass infrastructure to be built to support for food distribution. We expect the wealthy and corporations to be philanthropists.

But being a philanthropist costs money. So instead we have a bunch of farms and food producers instead tossing out food because it's cheaper to throw it away than it is to donate it.

So how can you claim it's a bad example when people would rather throw food away for profit?

Your expectation is that farms should operate at a loss such that no food goes to waste? Businesses that don't make money very quickly will get shut down. Or they could just always underproduce what the market needs in order to ensure that there is no waste.

Nice try, but when states and municipalities have made anti-food-waste laws, this hasn't happened.

In fact, with a little tweaking, most food businesses can profit from throwing away less food: garbage disposal isn't free, and food donations are a tax writeoff.

Someone I knew in Philadelphia used to trash pick food from the Trader Joe's dumpster. But they caught him on camera and then put up signs, and eventually put a lock on the dumpster. They literally spent money to buy signs and a lock, and pay people to put up the signs and lock the dumpster every night.

Oh, for sure, if the government is fronting the cost of donations via tax incentives, then we just need to keep on increasing those incentives until it's worth it for the farms to implement this for whatever we consider a "required" percentage of their waste. Farms are already heavily incentivized to minimize their waste in the first place, since that's a ton of labor costs going down the drain, in a business with relatively low margins, but missing out on the sale is still more important for staying in business.

Then maybe we need to re-evaluate the idea that farms need to be making profit over distributing food. I mean, farms already receive massive subsidies from the government in order to operate. We just had a round of farm bailouts because they couldn’t sell their food to international markets. Now they are throwing food away because they can’t sell it locally. Meanwhile there are lines stretching miles long with people waiting for food. Perhaps for-profit food production should not be a goal for a society.

> The large number of empty apartments being rented 3-4 nights a month on AirBnb in most large cities seems to indicate otherwise.

High rent for shitty apartments has been part of SF and NYC life for 30 years before Airbnb. This is more of a NIMBY problem. It’s politically easier to blame Airbnb then to build high rises with affordable rent and change the “culture” of the neighborhood /barf

How is a CPAP machine hack an indication that there are excess ventilators? I don’t think you thought that through.

> but it's far from allocated efficiently. I think it's time we recognized that.

Who hasn’t recognized there can be inefficiency in the current system? The argument is that a central planning committee is going to do much worse.

The gist of the article was that a CPAP machine was basically a ventilator with some features disabled in software. Given that there are many of these around, with a 3G internet connection and OTA updates, and that the manufacturer could easily turn a CPAP machine into a ventilator by "flicking a switch", yeah, I consider that an indication that they're "sitting on it". They'd rather sell you a new machine at over-inflated prices than enable existing machines to be repurposed.

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