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As you say this can cut both ways. A good example would be the US where people constantly wonder whether $thing-that-29-out-of-30-developed-countries-do-since-decades could truly work. Yeah it works, we have seen it work, it is currently working.

Now imagine you are a software developer entering the offices of a group of bueraucratic clercs that keep an intricate fax-and-scanner-based system of bullshit just barely afloat. Of course as a person that is specialized on thinking about the storage, transformation, santitizarion, transmission and deletion of data you are going to probably have a slightly more sophisticated take on information processing than them. They might know the law better or which combinations of checkboxes a person is allowed to tick on a form, but they suck at the meta task of organizing the efficient, fast and error free flow, storage, deletion, etc of information. And sure now one could argue about the merrits of paper (and I routinely argue it's merrits for democratic elections, where correctness and traceability are more important than speed), but that would be like arguing for making doctors use medival hand tools in the age of the scalpel.

Now it is true that outsiders to a system won't see what reasons there are for a certain thing being shaped a certain way, but this can sometimes even happen to insiders if the information handover is bad enough.

The argument from what other countries have done can often be used simplistically. Yes, it’s important to learn from other countries. However, when you look into it, it sometimes turns out that the other 29 countries have all done things in somewhat different ways, that their solutions are somewhat path-dependent and culture-specific, that they have problems too, and your country has some unique problems of its own that are hard to overcome.

Yeah, sure. You cannot translate what works in Sweden one to one to the US and expect the same success. But here is what you could do: realize that the cultural differences between Turkey, France, Australia, Ireland, Japan, Finland, UK, Germany, Poland, Austria, Italy, Croatia, Belgium and so on are very likely not less than the difference between the US to all of these countries. And yet, some things US citizens claim can't ever work do so in very different cultures, under various right or left wing governments and in different climate zones.

But keep on telling yourself the story that the US is so exceptional that reasonable conservative policies that work everywhere else can't work. This is likely just going to work out great in the long run.

The difference between California, Texas, South Dakota, Maine, Ohio are as different as Turkey, France, Australia, Ireland, Japan... It's a really foolish opinion or disregard the immense diversity of 350,000,000 people, and (unfortunately) it's made all over the internet.

"Why don't you just do X", totally papers over the extent of what just needs to happen.

"Everyone should just do Y" is always bad policy. Just look at what happened with something as simple as wearing masks.

Each government in the world is for the most part presented with the same set of puzzles. Then they spend good money trying to solve it in isolation as if they are all unique and special.

Some countries are just 1000 years behind in some areas, or 1000 years ahead. The US is no exception in both.

If you never did leg day the gains will be easy.

>The difference between California, Texas, South Dakota, Maine, Ohio are as different as Turkey, France, Australia, Ireland, Japan

This is just so obviously not true on the surface. We all speak the same language at the very least, which isn't true for a single one of those countries you listed.

Australia and Ireland certainly speak the same language as much as Maine and Texas do.

They speak French in Louisiana, German in Amish Country, Gullah in North Carolina... Your ignorance doesn't make you correct.

while clearly the Amish language is related to German, it is not German spoken in Germany. Btw, all these people can speak English.

So can many of the people in Turkey, France, Japan, etc.

Tangentially related, but how long can languages really be considered a barrier when AI translations are ubiquitous.

I am aware that the US is not one monolithic block. To assume otherwise is a very US-thing to do. The rest of the world literally drowns in news about the US internal conflicts.

But maybe I sould give an example: guns. I grew up in an European region where the percentage of gun owners is close to US levels, yet our last school rampage was a decade ago. The rural town I grew up in is famous for it's traditional gunsmiths and home of a Glock factory, so not what some in the US would call big city liberals. The reason gun crime is low here is because we have commons sense gun laws of the type most gun owners in the US supporr as well. Yet you have US politicians claiming "it is a slippery slope" and it "can't possibly work".

Yeah, look at the numbers, it works, it also works in comparable regions to mine with totally different social and cultural circumstances. Of course if you'd like to you could also implement it in a way so it doesn't work, but that would be evil on a comic book villain level right?

The problem in the US is that corporations are really damn effective there to trick a sizable amount of the population into believing all kind of excuses that fall apart the second you look elsewhere.

E.g. given our gun laws many US citizens would say our freedom has been taken away, yet somehow 10 year old me managed to go shooting on empty cans with my hunter grandfather. We had a god damn shooting range in the cellar of our school. It is just that our guns are stored safely and people who shouldn't have guns don't have them. E.g. because they issue threats, have a history of violence, drug abuse, mental illness, or showed otherwise that they act irresponsible with the lives of their neighbours.

But maybe you know more about why the world I live in can't work and have a good explaination that for some reason keeps benefiting certain corporations, while it kills the kids of your population.

You, sir, are an idiot. Keep playing victim, though; I'm sure that'll work out for you.

Spoken by a cretin disqualified by their own disability to add substantial points to a debate.

Pro-Tip: If you aim to critique the points someone made, a sure way to come across like a total fool is to call the person names instead of saying anything useful. This is one of the things that says more about you than the person you attacked ; )

while I agree we need some sort of nationalized health care and should learn from the countries that have implemented it, I'm not sure thats the strong success you think it is?

Just recently we had a bunch of comments here on HN about how bad candian health care can be if you live in the 'wrong' area. UK has had issues with NHS for decades at least (hell, they ALSO have 'private' insurance which seems to be almost a requirement). And several other EU countries have hit issues with healthcare lately (charge fat people/smokers more since they use more resources was fairly divisive recently.

Personally - I think it all boils down to scale. As these systems grow, it becomes harder to sustain them. That doesn't bode well for the US with 10x the population of Canada :-(

It sucks because I'd really like it, and I'd love not having my health care tied to my job ...

As a Canadian who has lived in the United States and in the United Kingdom, I can say without a doubt that both Canada and the UK beat the US "system" by a mile. While their universal healthcare can have problems, the problems in the US system are far worse.

Yeah - I have family in both countries (parents: mom & family from Leeds, dad and family from London cousins: I don't actually know where in Canada they are now)

Obviously, there is a lot of good stuff we can copy/learn from both countries. The thing is to make sure we can iron out as many issues as possible (large population and geographic area mostly) before we attempt something and having politicians claim it "doesn't work".

Seem my response to isleyaardvark above for my (stupid) idea to try to us the VA hospitals to test bed some of this.

Thanks!

Not too long ago I saw an article from a Canadian source about how bad Canadian healthcare was getting, and complaining Canada had or was about to drop out of the top 10 rankings.

It had a scatter chart showing the metrics, and while Canada was shown as lower than many of the other countries, the gap between all those countries and the US was enormous.

When other countries complain about their healthcare, they're complaining about complaining about sane systems not performing to their standards, and that doesn't make the US any less of a dumpster fire.

I agree, single payer/universal health should be a table stakes. And I wasn't picking on Canada - it seems to be a better system all around. But all systems can be improved (as you mentioned). If we're going to this from scratch, shouldn't we look at all the systems and try to follow the 'best practices' from all of them ?

One reason I look at Canada so much is the population is almost 1/10th of the U.S. population - so I would expect (naively) all issues would be magnified 10x. Also, the pain points with Canada's healthcare seems to be in scaling and funding as the population grows? Scaling up the number of doctors/hospitals available - to cut wait times, and providing consistent funding not based on where you live. Definitely solvable and much better then the issues the US healthcare system has.

For the US, I think good way to start might be to actually fund the VA Hospitals and see what it takes to properly run a national health organization in the US. How many doctors does it require? How many hospitals? What sort of budget? etc. If we can scale up the VA to provide quality healthcare without the under staffing, waits, long distances between facilities, etc across the entire country - then we can use those lessons to scale up to true universal healthcare? The last thing we want to do is introduce some half-assed 'designed to fail' system that lets politicians just say 'yeah, we tried that...Didn't work'

Thanks!

> It’s an ugly, toxic cycle that bottoms out at everyone constantly having their knowledge and competence questioned over things they know and can do, by people who don’t and can’t.

That rings so true in my head. Being too open and transparent got me quite a lot of misery already. More than once, I got the work of months discarded, because some other (shiny or new) approach was deemed to provide a better solution -- only to the effect that it was later discovered that it was the worse approach.

Apparently it is very easy to miss in the pursuit for the best solution, in unfortunate favor of one's preconceived notions.

I tend to ask in rapid succession if obvious solutions were used. It gives me warmup time to think about more detail.

Unfortunately people get annoyed when they ask for help and someone offers them 10 solutions they already have tried.

But often one of the obvious was not tried or considered so the person gets quick solution. Otherwise warmup to think more in details and ask follow-up questions why some of “obvious” solutions did not work gives great intro to get up and fix something.

I think it very much depends on the how (as often).

Very different to ask something along the lines of "Why didn't you just do X?" (the unwritten "duh!" being very implicitly present!) vs. "Interesting. Naively I would've have thought that doing X might solve this and seeing you didn't go with that solution I'd be interested to understand the constraints and reasons that make X unviable."

With the first (type of) question you've disqualified yourself already, even though you didn't 'just give the solution' (which is even worse). After that kind of question we're already on adversarial grounds.

The "5 whys" is a great technique but if literally just ask "Why" a lot, you'll get the boot more often than not ;)

I dislike "other people's solutions", because frequently they are shallow.

It's sort of like internet relationship advice.

It tends to lack nuance, like "if you can't agree on a couch to buy, you should leave the relationship".

> But maybe don’t lead with your advice.

Unsolicited advice is a pretty big relationship friction generator.

Ya the blogger falls for a fallacy that I often see from people who consider themselves smart, especially in tech: that they are somehow more clever/insightful/effective than other people and know how everything should work.

But as I've gotten older and more experienced, I've come to understand that everyone is uniquely talented and brilliant in some way. The vast majority of people are just vulnerable to becoming trapped in situations that are nontrivial to change, due to their own life choices yes, but just as often due to external circumstances and empathy for how following their desires might impact those around them.

This phenomenon presents as survivorship bias, the epitome of which is some rich person or billionaire telling young people that they could afford rent or a mortgage by giving up avocado toast. When the truth is that companies like RealPage formed a price-fixing cartel using algorithms to set rents in most major cities in the US, despite dwellings sitting empty, because it's more profitable to capitalize on a smaller number of high rents. Now they are being sued by attorneys general around the country.

This othering/prejudice extends to homelessness where people blame drugs instead of economic injustice, or mistreatment of the elderly where they think they should have paid more into their retirement rather than seeing that 30% of their life savings got wiped out after the pandemic due to corporate greed inflation and soon stagflation.

This isn't the tech dystopia I signed up for. In my experience, people are wealthy due to their ruthlessness, not their business acumen, but maybe those are the same thing. I think often now about how to stop this algorithm-driven late stage capitalism, but by definition it may be too late. Going off grid via solarpunk might be a great individual strategy, but it's similar to not voting, in that the people profiting from the decline in the human condition do better without the innovators. I feel now that eternal vigilance, mainly through organizing, is the only way that we'll actually reclaim the economic liberty that we used to enjoy.

These broad connections are what I see any time I read these truthy/quippy essays now.

Ironically, most of what you’ve said here is false because it’s government in the driving seat, not business. The infamous avocado toast incident was regarding a mortgage down payment, not rent. That’s due to the post-2008 asset bubble created by central banks.

If you think fentanyl is not a critical component of the US’ homelessness crisis I don’t know what to say - go to Europe, the homeless there are not in a zombie-like state. There’s no compassion in ignoring people’s real problems and instead blaming them on our own political gripes. The festering of this problem is a product of bad government.

As for retirement savings - are you kidding me? Pensions are the most protected assets on this planet - no matter how hard they fail they will be bailed out. That inflation you speak of is, again, due to all that post-2008 money from the government. Interest rates are set by the central bank. (No doubt some unfortunate people had to draw-down their retirement savings but they’re the exception that proves the rule). For the first time in history we will have an economy where money is flowing up from the young to the old, rather than downwards - it is the young people who are being exploited! The children who will pay for this don’t even get a vote.

The real problem I see here is that people vote themselves all the money whenever they get the chance, with governments able to pile on more and more debt to be paid by future generations. Plus a government that is more interested in ideological posturing than solving problems - unless the solution is more government.

It's strange to absolve "business" and then blame the government for problems caused by business.

First the post-2008 asset bubble; why does that exist? Lenders became extremely lax with credit requirements and created an incredibly toxic debt bubble. Sure you can argue the bailouts and subsequent low interest rate environment maybe have been the wrong medicine, but it's easy to say that in hindsight when at the time several people had been wiped out.

>If you think fentanyl is not a critical component of the US’ homelessness crisis I don’t know what to say

Why is fentanyl a problem in the US? I think it's insincere to pretend Purdue didn't have an outsized effect on this problem. They pushed opioids on doctors and flooded rural america with oxycontin. Once addicted Americans could no longer get oxycontin, they turned to heroin, and the increased demand of heroin created the conditions for fentanyl to flood the market.

>Pensions are the most protected assets on this planet

401(k) were almost completely wiped out in 2008. Why focus on pensions when most people's retirement vehicles today are tax-deferred investment accounts?

Businesses are free create deeply systemic issues and when those behind the issues are rich and the problems externalized onto the rest of the country, we are free to turn around and blame the "bad" government.

It's like licking a door handle and blaming the human body in the "drivers seat" for cells dying when it raises the internal temperature to 102 degrees. How about instead of blaming the immune system for the 102 degree fever, we just don't lick door handles?

People often confuse "predictable" with "not at fault". Your drug addict cousin will, very predictably, steal shit when they visit. It's a matter of prudence to keep them away from your valuables, but it's still their fault for stealing. Likewise, corporations will very predictably be astoundingly evil if they can make a buck at it, so the government is obligated to keep them in line, but it doesn't absolve the companies from being at fault.

> due to corporate greed inflation

The inflation is the inevitable result of flooding the economy with trillions of dollars in freshly printed money. It happens every time the printing press is run like that, in every country, throughout history.

> we'll actually reclaim the economic liberty that we used to enjoy

Having the government run the economy is not economic liberty.

Isn't it funny that everyone right of center thinks inflation is due to trillions of dollars added to the economy and everyone left of center thinks inflation is due to people in 3-piece suits and monocles wanting another boat?

Why can't it be both?

The Law of Supply and Demand.

For example, open a lemonade stand in your neighborhood. Charge $20 a cup. See how it goes.

How about I run a bunch of fear ads and sell ammo for $20/box instead. I think we both know how it will go on that one.

Go right ahead! Let us know how it turns out.

Been working out quite well even without the ads, actually.

Another poster said $20 was about market rate, so the example does not demonstrate that people will pay whatever you ask.

It was half that pre-Covid.

‘Market rate’ is exactly what I’m talking about.

A better example would be $500/box since $20/box is about market rate depending on the exact kind and caliber (assuming 9mm or 45 which is going to cover the overwhelming majority of handguns).

No ad is going to make $500/box for 9mm or 45 handgun ammunition seem reasonable.

Where are the people that think inflation is inevitable because there is always a political push from the most active political constituency (old people/about to be old people/their beneficiaries) to keep asset prices rising to be able to fulfill their demands from labor suppliers (younger, less experienced, less politically active)?

Especially entertaining with the way demographics are going. It wasn’t much of an issue in previous decades due to momentum of population growth.

Some moderate level of inflation is a pretty basic economic principle. Too much and you cause some problems but none or negative and you see a whole host of other issues.

That's like saying the fact the first couple payments on a loan are almost all interest because of a conspiracy among politically active bankers, when in actuality it's because that's how math works.

Yes, small positive inflation is better than any negative inflation. But the inflation in land/education/healthcare is quite a bit more than that.

> Some moderate level of inflation is a pretty basic economic principle

The US had zero net inflation from 1800 to 1914, and fantastic prosperity.

US property owners enjoyed vast expanses of unexploited resources to tap and legally protected exploitation of whole classes of people to help them do so. I hope you are not claiming that that (limited) prosperity wasn't generated by wiser and more humane policies than today's.

Edit timer expired before I noticed and could correct "wasn't" to "was" here.

The US saw an enormous improvement in the average standard of living of Americans in its first century. Scores of millions of people moved up from poverty into the middle class.

This happens in every country that tries it.

For an example of an economy entirely focused on resource extraction? The Arab oil nations.

For examples of highly prosperous nations that have no resources to speak of? Japan and S Korea. With free markets.

BTW, it wasn't possible in the 19th century to have a 40 hr week and vast welfare payments. The productivity wasn't enough to fund it.

This is why it’s critical to provide new angles to the problem itself, not just a bunch of solutions many of which has obviously been considered already.

You're so right. Thanks for this perspective

"Just get more sleep."

I'm skipping avocado toast!

I've skipped skipping avocado toast, I just look for good deals on avocado and buy limes no matter what their price is.

No matter the price? No wonder we're drowning in limeflation!

I would sooner not buy the bread and just eat avocado+lime+salt! Limeflation be damned.