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Comment by eleveriven | Hacker News Reader

The fact that families have to crowdfund lifesaving care creates the vulnerability but it doesn't force anyone to build an industrialized scam on top of it

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    Local man embezzles $20,000 meant to keep 200 orphans from being crushed in the orphan-crushing machine.

there is no trolley

Orphan crushing machine operator: "If I don't do it, someone else will"

Orphan crushing proponent: "Why should I pay for orphans not to be crushed??"

There's money to be made on arbitration of orphan crushing! If I don't do it someone else will.

Introducing “The Automatic Orphan Crusher 9000” complete with conveyor belt fed chutes and titanium jaws, no orphan can escape! Just place a piece of candy…”

Does it have AI?

That would be part of our Orphan Industries plan for managing output of your 9000s on the industrial floor. Sure. Monitor throughput and TTK right there from the app.

This framing is disingenuous. We're meant to say "tear down the orphan-crushing machine!" But in this case there's no machine, only human mortality. You're substituting a simple question ("why are we crushing orphans?") for a complex one ("who should pay for poor children's healthcare?")

Also, the scale seems much larger than $20k.

> doesn't force anyone to build an industrialized scam on top of it

The incentives are there. Our economy runs on incentives. Create a vulnerable group and the sharks smell blood in the water.

Incentives don’t remove agency. They might have incentives… but these are awful scum who deserve nothing but contempt

Well, that's a pretty bold stance. Scammers who steal from dying children are bad people? Geez...

No but it provides a framework to begin thinking about ways we can protect the vulnerable from these contemptible but totally predictable bad actors.

For example, families forced to publicly beg for money to provide their sick children with treatment. What societal structures enable this situation to occur? Who is profiting off of this structure?

You'd have to be inconscionably crass to profiteer off charities treating kids for cancer ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_J._Trump_Foundation "Granting money to charities that rented Trump Organization facilities".

No-one is hoarding a free and easy supply of treatments. They're all hard-won advancements. The vulnerability is there by default.

Whether taxes, health insurance, the Church, or gofundme, technically all life saving care is mostly crowd-funded. Maybe not in some Wild West dystopia, but generally the pooling of funds seems to work better than solo funding.

Involuntary, progressive crowdfunding through government threat of violence (taxes) seems to work better than the other methods and most consider it humane. Americans have shown little interest historically in doing the humane thing, unfortunately.

Taxes: the price one must pay for civilization.

>but it doesn't force anyone to build an industrialized scam on top of it

I mean almost the entirety of the US healthcare system is a industrialized scam engineered by middlemen

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