Healthcare
Internet access
College
At least we have cheap gas? farts
(+) there still seems to be a massive wage premium for "being physically in a San Francisco office" even if most of the work is being done by an AI, which cannot be sustainable
Their education was not 10x ours and their economy was only a few % over ours per capita.
This is not the case.
Canadians like myself have ~40% of our provincial taxes spent on healthcare, so in my case about ~8% of my gross income. Somewhere in the tune of $20k/yr. While I was living in Seattle and filing American, quite a bit less of my gross income went to healthcare. Just food for thought.
Well, maybe I spoke too soon, because my private American healthcare turns out to also be about 8% of my gross income (of $60k)(before copays and my deductible)(and also it's crap). Twinsies!
But yes I agree that it would be awful to have my health needs taken care of and a mere ~160k USD left to spend on everything else.
I think either way both of us are in really good shape. In my experience the quality of American care is better in nearly every regard (having experienced both pretty intimately), but the simplicity and the peace of mind of the Canadian system has its benefits too. In either case you end up paying.
> But yes I agree that it would be awful to have my health needs taken care of and a mere ~160k USD left to spend on everything else.
I’m confused - do you actually think it’s awful?
>I think either way both of us are in really good shape.
I'm lying in bed with non-specific upper abdominal discomfort that I'm hoping isn't related to digestive issues (pancreatic) that I've had for years, but which I can't get treated for because my insurance-related circumstances have made it very difficult to get consistent access to, and then to be taken seriously by, relevant specialists. These issues have combined with chronic injuries that were poorly managed in their acute phase and poor access to quality nutrition to make it difficult for me to exercise consistently. Contrarily and consequently, I'm quite out-of-shape.
The best and most consistent care I've ever gotten was while I was on Medicaid (which was still yet hampered by the professional stigma against accepting Medicaid and treating Medicid patients well).
>In my experience the quality of American care is better in nearly every regard (having experienced both pretty intimately
You experienced the quality of care available to rich people. That quality of care is not widely available, not for lack of institutional capacity, but primarily due to lack of profit.
>I’m confused
I really don't think you are.
Worth noting that taxes in the US are a lot lower than they should be because a large portion of government expenses are financed with debt. Canada owns over 400B in US debt, so that's Canada "subsidizing" US taxes.
Also, yes, that's how healthcare works: when you're young and less sick, you tend to pay more than you get out of it, and then it reverses as you get older.
Healthcare, education, and housing are expensive in the US for the same primary reason: political interventions that simultaneously subsidize demand and restrict supply.
e.g. https://documentscontractuels.orange.fr/les-offres-orange-mo...
The good news is that modern fiber systems blow cable internet out of the water. It is far cheaper to supply symmetric gigabit internet to every customer over fiber than over cable. Fiber just has more bandwidth to go around. And because it’s a different technology it is not subject to the same local monopolies that cable is encumbered with. This means that the free market is correcting the problem and has been for a decade. In many parts of the country it is now possible to get internet that is faster and cheaper than what is available in the even the best built parts of Europe. The main obstacle to that build–out is probably local permitting. Many large cities require new permits, with public comment periods for each and every one of them, for every single block that an ISP lays fiber for. Cities like San Francisco have imposed a glacial pace on their ISPs.
Exclusive francise agreements between municipalities and cable operators have been outlawed since 1992. But it's generally uneconomic to overbuild a new network with the potential to touch every home unless a large portion will subscribe.
Fiber internet is typically much better than cable internet, but cable internet is good enough for most people, so they're unlikely to switch unless it's significantly cheaper, which it often isn't -- especially since local incumbents tend to lower prices or rollout better service when a new entrant is entering the market (or announces they will ... Google Fiber city selection announcements drove lots of competing rollouts even though Google didn't install anything in those cities).
Regulation requiring wholesale access / line sharing / or strict separation of first mile and service infrastructure would allow for competition in service and routing, without having to build a 3rd last mile network. Congress did this in 1996, but the FCC walked it back for cable, the courts said if it doesn't apply to cable, it doesn't apply to telephone, and the FCC said internet over power lines exists and provides competition despite the lack of providers. Congress never came back to make clear that it wanted line sharing, so it disappeared from the mainstream.
I have municipal fiber where the municipality handles last mile only and I have a choice of IP service providers. But installation was very expensive and monthly service is also expensive relative to the ILEC and the cable company, although the cable company service on my street ends before it reaches me.
The cable and telephone companies have a major cost advantage that they can rebuild their networks with a good expectation of customer uptake; and they're allowed to manage the finances of build out however they see fit. The muni fiber (in my state anyway) has to bill customers for the costs of install and even if it could self-finance a build out to service all homes, wouldn't see a lot of uptake because most people find their current service to be good enough.
Where we are is very much not a function of the free market.
And that competition is definitely a good thing. Xfinity’s offering was far worse before they had competition because there was no incentive to offer anything better. They’ve even introduced a new idea to the market in order to win people back away from fiber: guaranteed fixed prices for five years. No surprises when promotional rates expire, no price increases, no shenanigans at all for five whole years. That alone is a breath of fresh air compared to their own business practices of just a year or two ago. Ziply had to respond by lowering their prices and ending promotional rates because they were losing customers. You know the old saying: as iron sharpens iron, so too does man sharpen man.
It would be better, of course, if the government were not mismanaging things. Switzerland’s solution is the better way to go than what we have today. Their government paid to build a nation–wide fiber network, and any ISP can service any customer on that network. That allows ISPs to compete on price and features without worrying about having to build their own competing and overlapping network. This is already how electric service works in many states, so it’s not even like we can’t make it work.
>Their government paid to build a nation–wide fiber network
So did we. The last step is nationalizing that network and finishing the build-out in-house.
When we paid for national broadband access here in the US, it was not for fiber to the home. It was for DSL. Worse, the FCC measured coverage not by service address as it does today, but by census district. The phone companies merely had to assert that they could provide service to an address in the district and the FCC would count the whole district as covered. The districts aren’t very big, so in dense areas that was not a bad estimation. In less dense areas it was just a giant loophole. They could provide service to one house on the edge of the district and not bother with the hundreds of homes miles away out in the countryside. Officially we got exactly what we paid for.
As you say we could still nationalize these fiber networks and stitch them together into a real national network. Of course they don’t all use exactly the same technology, and it would be a huge political fight, but in principle I could see a government agency gradually buying networks from the ISPs and integrating them. Of course you know that if Trump proposes it then the Democrats will immediately oppose it on the general principle that Trump proposed it.
Municipal fiber is not outlawed here in Oregon, so there are quite a few municipal networks here. But they are not expanding as fast as even a single ISP like Ziply Fiber. None of them have expanded beyond their small town to serve unincorporated areas near by. All of them are funded more by taxes than by subscribers.
I have never seen anyone articulate this so crisply.
The government has created a situation with the student loans thing where basically anyone can borrow 500k to get an obviously useless degree.
Are the colleges going to ensure they collect that money? Obviously yes.
The point applies even to the useful degrees, and more broadly to the universities irrespective of any particular degree program. Student loans and scholarships make demand almost completely inelastic -- totally insensitive to price increases. Universities compete to attract the best students, and a major mechanism for doing that is to invest in non-academic amenities, such that tuition prices are funding much more than literal tuition. Combine these two factors together, and you have a feedback loop of continuous price inflation.
Similar factors are at work in the healthcare and housing sectors, with the most important element being that external subsidies eliminate price elasticity on the demand side of the equation, and completely obliterate the dynamics that ensure downward price pressure in normal markets.
Sure is funny how FDR had us spend a little cash 100 years ago to ensure even the remotest farm gets electricity, and we already gave ISPs a shitload of cash to do the same, but now "We can't" build telephone poles to rural places. Even though those same places already have telephone poles for power and telephone.
AT&T was able to leverage it's monopoly position and defense industry relationship to basically invent everything that runs the modern world (and were compelled to license those advancements out) while modern monopolies can't even dig some holes.
Sounds like we need some more "Consent Decrees" and a DoJ that makes large companies scared.
We damned every single river in the nation. We built so much railroad that it crashed the industry. We built those railroads purposely in places where nobody lived and then willed towns into existence around them. We built the interstate highway system.
Why can we suddenly not build anything? Maybe it's because people keep insisting, against all historical evidence, that we can't, and they don't even try.
That does even begin to touch on crazy laws banning people from setting up their own ISP to compete: https://www.techdirt.com/2024/11/07/16-u-s-states-still-ban-....
There is ample historical evidence that this is a poor excuse.
Long ago, leaders in the US understood the value of universality. You'll likely recognize this as the Network Effect, Metcalfe's Law, etc. Back in the day, they called this "universal service." That thinking was central to the policies established for both electrification and phone service in the US: it wasn't then, and isn't now, truly universal, but what could be feasibly accommodated was, even when costs were/are quite high.
It wasn't lost on the people of those times that such policies inherently meant the cost of including sparsely populated, distant areas would be subsidized by concentrated areas. Before those systems appeared, the founders welded the same thinking into the US constitution in the form of the US postal service, with exactly the same knowledge and concerns.
We've lost that. The change happened prior to the advent of the internet. You're free to attribute this to whatever you wish; I won't offer my view on that, except to say there are no innocents: every argument that fingers ebil capitalists can be countered by examples of urban leaders damning government policies that subsidize non-urbanites. What I know with certainty is, if packet switched networking was somehow a thing in the 19th century, availability would be a given for almost any structure more significant than a hunting cabin in the US today, complete with common carrier, service baselines and rates established with clarity.
But, a quick search indicates you can get similar broadband in Glasgow, Scotland for ~15 GBP/month. And Rome, Italy looks like ~25EUR/month.
Otherwise the same system.
But this is a pretty common setup for condos in Swedish cities. Rentals usually have access to the same infrastructure but at higher prices due to kickbacks demanded by the landlords from the ISPs.
The backbone of it all is a state owned fiber connecting the cities together with municipal fiber.
But even outside of the cities FTTP is quite common. There are companies which specialize in finding rural areas where there’s enough interest to justify the cost of connecting them and then coordinating getting an economic association setup to own and manage the local infrastructure.
Some kind of city(iirc) managed fiber and he can switch commercial operators (And speeds/prices) by contacting them to get new terms, that's an actually free market.