Advertising.
discounts. its all pre-calculated in the price
cold calling.
also robo-calls.
Hallmark Holidays
Expensive tips, already calculated into the bill.
Termite bonds
Dental care being treated as separate from health care.
You can die from teeth issues
Honestly, just health care in general being locked behind insurance to the point where people conflate the two conceots entirely!
Dental insurance in most cases is closer to what health insurance should be: an entirely optional, and generally affordable, policy that can offset major expenses. Not an expense that rivals housing in magnitude and is required for most people just to access the basic care needed by nearly everyone.
Or maybe we do away with the insurance all together and treat medical care as the public service it should be yeah?
Just taking this opportunity to remind Americans that you already pay a far higher portion of the public purse into your healthcare system than any nation with universal care. You get basically nothing for it while we get cradle to grave coverage for every citizen regardless of our socioeconomic status.
Then on top of these taxes you are also paying private insurers for the privilege of then paying your doctors
Yeah… It’s only like that for 1 country
You can die from teeth issues, you need teeth to properly digest food with since you chew on it, people really do judge you a lot on whether you have good teeth, attractive teeth is important, nobody likes bad breath, nobody likes yellowed teeth .etc
And it is stupidly expensive to deal with.
A lot of people don’t take these things in to account. Due to health issues I have slowly lost my teeth over the past 15 years. Due to poverty and systemic problems I couldn’t get them fixed. Now I’m in my 40s and left with barely enough teeth to chew - no molars, and my face is shifting because it doesn’t have the support structure anymore, which puts painful pressure on my remaining teeth all the time. Technically my health benefits say they pay for dentures but it’s been nothing but a run around, months and months of waiting for paperwork to be mailed and just utter nonsense while I’m here with a handful of teeth and I’m scared to talk to people or make friends because as soon as people see my teeth the judge me and leave.
This makes perfect sense from the supply side. Very few (younger) people need expensive medical care, so we can pool the risk. Almost everyone needs some, regular dental care, so it’s more like a savings account than insurance. I’m not claiming that the insurance systems in any given country aren’t exploitative, just that medical and dental insurance should be different.
Or maybe we stop treating everything as a money printing thing and instead as taking care of the population around us? The money is there, we just need to stop bombing girl’s schools in Iran or building a golden shrine to Fuhrer Trump.
We shouldn’t have fucking health insurance or dental insurance period.
I mean, I agree with the first part fully, but I think what you mean is that we shouldn’t have for-profit corporate run insurance.
Any socialised health care is a form of insurance—a way for us to pool the risk of large bad events, so that everyone (or a lot of people) pays a little so that a few people aren’t totally destroyed by the catastrophe. The alternative to having insurance is that we let people die when rare but really bad things happen. We absolutely should have insurance, but we should all share the cost equally, or the rich should pay more, rather than a few people massively profiting from running the enterprise.
But, however we run it, we’ll need to treat dental differently from medical because of what I said in my first comment
No forget insurance altogether. Socialized health care is absolutely not a form of insurance. That’s not what any of those words mean.
You might be thinking of single payer healthcare but that’s not what I’m arguing for. It feels like you’ve got a very high school level understanding of words and are trying to discuss concepts without understanding the distinction and mashing things together. Just because things might have a few overlapping points doesn’t make them the same thing. That’s not how language works.
A government run system, of which only two exist that I know of, the NHS and IHS (Indian healthcare system for native Americans), are not insurance. They aren’t a pooling of risk, they’re a taxpayer paid service. It’s a complete flip from what insurance is. Just because they have to pool taxpayer money to fund it does not make it insurance.
What?
Government funded and administered health care systems being a form of risk pooling and insurance are not controversial ideas. These are standard definitions.
I’m not sure where you’re getting these ideas. Why would taxpayer paid services not be a form of risk pooling? There are hundreds of countries around the world with government run health systems, or government funded and privately run systems, or private-public partnerships in various forms. Pooling taxpayer money to fund health care for those individuals unlucky enough to need it absolutely does make it insurance.
I recommend reading the Wikipedia pages on “universal health care” and “health insurance” if you’d like to start learning about these topics.
I’m an academic statistician who discusses risk and related concepts with experts every day…
And I do data analysis for a hospital chain (spent time today figuring out what percent of people in our hospital system are underinsured in different risk categories such as tobacco cigarette smokers and such). Your point about being a statistician means nothing.
So you can calculate p-values big whoop. You’re absolutely not using terms the way the average person does in my day to day in industry and conflating them. I’ve been all over those Wikipedia pages plenty.
Try again.
Just curious, and I’ll admit it’s too my discredit that I’m even engaging, but why are you behaving this way?
Privatization of government institutions and programs.
Seriously this. The success of a public service shouldn’t be how much revenue is generated or shareholder value is gained. We as a society are the shareholders and deserve infrastructure that works for us. Corporations have pushed the idea that lower taxes is better, but when you have to spend more to a company to get basic necessities, you’re not really coming out on top buddy.
Regan really did a number on the US. Broad privatization of public services, with all the wrong incentives in place. Which was then a vicious cycle of people hating their experience with public services -> politicians cut their funding -> service gets worse -> people hate their experience -> repeat until all your taxes have been siphoned to private entities and your govt is in shambles.
Let’s be clear Reagan started it but Clinton really kicked it into overdrive. Privatization is unfortunately bipartisan.
Listened to a really good podcast episode on this recently
Nobody wants public school anymore and the private schools are booming. Source: am private school teacher
Yes people want public schools.
Insurance
Insurance is nothing but a legal protection racket. The only difference is when you lapse on your protection money, the insurers don’t go and blow your kneecaps out, although United Health has effectively killed people who lapsed on payments before or denied them potentially life-saving drugs.
As a concept or in practice?
Yes
Does that mean you don’t buy insurance or are you paying someone to intentionally scam you?
It is strange that you don’t have an option to choose a insurance company who are not scammers. I mean, that no one thought of starting an insurance company which promotes self on actually helping their customers.
There are companies outside US who are not scamming people and still are profitable.
Outside of the US here: nearly every insurance company in Belgium (that are coincidently also the banks) are 100% scamming people and literally make their entire business model off of ripping people off as much as possible.
Using any and every excuse to deny people the insurance they paid for when they have legitimate claims is literally how they are “profitable.”
We have quite a lot of public stats on the insurance companies in Denmark. You can see how many formal complaints a company have received, I.e. customers who have made a complaint a decision made by the insurance company, how many of these complaints have been in favor of the insurance company or the customer, which types of insurances each company gets most complaints about, etc. So there is a lot of data that allows you to make a informed decision about which insurance company you want to choose.
And even on the off chance they actually pay for whatever you need, you need to go through an ungodly amount of bureaucracy and most certainly pay a deductible as if you are not already paying enough for the insurance!
who are not scamming people
yet. The need for infinite growth will always lead to insurance companies to engage in the DDD playbook and worse when they capture the finite market of users.
Two party politics
The real estate market. In many countries, the value of labor and materials necessary to build a house is about
30 to 4040 to 120 thousand euros. Everything else is speculation.Edit. Initially I put 30 to 40 thousand euros.
Where the fuck do you live? In switzerland your average new house costs around 300-400k
Value is how much socially necessary labor it actually took to build and maintain that house: materials, construction work, infrastructure, etc. It’s the real human effort crystallized in the building.
Price is what they slap on it in the market, which can be wildly disconnected from its actual value. In housing, price gets inflated by speculation, land monopolies, credit bubbles, location hype, and landlord parasites treating homes as investment vehicles to extract rent.
So you might have a crumbling flat that cost relatively little labor to build 40 years ago, but because it’s in a “desirable area” with a housing shortage artificially maintained by capital, its price skyrockets. That is a socially enforced ransom, not the value.
https://open.oregonstate.education/sociologicaltheory/chapter/value-price-and-profit/
How did you arrive at the 30 to 40 thousand euro figure
From a friend of mine who built a house in Southern Italy some years ago.
You can also find numbers on the Internet, see basic construction cost in Bulgaria here: https://arch-pfoertner.com/en/blog/bulgaria-vs-spain-building-costs
I’m assuming labour cost is still pretty low in Southern Italy, because in North/Western Europe you can have a kitchen and a bathroom renovated for that money, but no way build an entire house.
Just a bathroom for $40k in Australia.
I am just talking about the cost to build the actual house plus the profit the contractor slaps on top. The price of your house will not be below 1 million in most places because of the reasons you stated
Not in ZH it’s not
It’s not only speculation, it’s also because some locations are a lot more wanted by many people to live there: right next to a big park, walkable neighbourhood, city amenities nearby but few city problems, no highway audible when sleeping with open window et cetera et cetera. More people want to live in prime locations than prime location housing is available.
The big scam are the insane prices for run down shoebox-apartments in shitty locations.
Location matters though. It wouldn’t make sense for a house to cost as much as it does to make. Though obviously prices have become completely detached from reality.
I moved to Chicago a few years. I go to rent an apartment. It has a “move-in” fee.
I’m like what’s that.
Oh it’s $500 that you don’t get back.
I say. What about the deposit? They say. Oh yeah we don’t require that. Isn’t that great ,?
I’m like. So move in fee is my deposit but it’s just guaranteed I won’t get it back.
Them: well it’s different. It’s a move in fee. We don’t require a deposit but if you don’t clean out the apartment to this list of specifications, we will charge you per item you miss.
Example. Refrigerator not cleaned :$150 Floors not clean : $200
Etc.
So I was super unhappy about this and complained to anyone who would listen. To which my new Chicago neighbors and friends were like “that’s how it’s always been here,”
Bro. Y’all getting fucked. Hard. Non refundable deposit where you still have to clean out the old apartment.
Wtf. Should be illegal.
that’s why you stiff em the last month’s rent
At least in Chicago, many landlords require references from past landlords when you are applying for a new apartment, so flaking on rent or trashing a place before moving out can doom your future endeavors.
Unless you get lucky and find a private owner to rent from that doesn’t bother with checking backgrounds.
Then you just have to deal with them taking ages to repair anything and letting themselves into your apartment unannounced to ‘check on things’.
In my experience the private landlords are the ones who actually fix shit. Last corp landlord I had lost a civil suit for 20 million in Cambridge mass for not maintaining the property.
It’s very hit or miss. Not all landlords are good or bad.
I know and I’ve been lucky in that regard…I will never rent from a corporate landlord again…I highly recommend avoiding Northland property.
as well as any llc
I’ve had the opposite experience but I think it’s always a gamble with landlords. Especially when moving to a new city and you can’t ask around.
Just give your landlord a burner phone number. Don’t even clean the jizz stains when you leave.
What the fuck? So it’s just a deposit you’re garuanteed to not get back? What if you don’t “miss” anything when cleaning up? You’re not getting your money back anyway so why clean anything when you’re moving out?
Yeah there was a whole list of things and the fine for not cleaning the items. So you had to make sure you got it super clean or you would get all the fines.
Of which amounted to something close to $1000.
I spent 2 days cleaning it when I moved out to make sure I didn’t get any of the fines.
You can basically get black listed as a renter if you don’t clean well.
A “move in” fee is not a deposit. It’s more like a goodwill payment, or you could call it a front pocket fee, even if there’s nobody else in queue. Obviously whoever is willing to pay the most gets the first choice.
It’s shady as fuck and also illegal where I live, but people still pay it instead of risking not getting the apartment. Sadly, nobody cares enough to take these scumbags to court over it. You can choose not to pay it but then you just don’t get the apartment, and if so, why’d you want to waste your time and money on a lawyer, when there’s nothing to win from doing so.
Florida does both
Passive income. If value is being created and you’re being presented some of it without doing any work it necessarily means that someone else isn’t receiving the full value of the work they’re doing.
subset of capitalism
Absolutely
In most cases I agree with you, but what about a musician who makes passive income off of people streaming their music, or people who buy my fonts?
Cap it at the original 28 years after creation. The current 70 years after the creator’s death is ridiculous.
Why should you be paid in perpetuity for work you did once? I’d love it if someone paid me residules for the work I did today making widgets.
Not passive income, they did the work of creating the music or the font
Or you’re squeezing all the value and more out of the asset and users, while increasing externalities
Sounds cool til you realize the assets being squeezed are mostly just other people
No no no. I gave them CULTURE! A wonderful work culture.
And security! Sure, not the security I decided I need for myself, and it’s only really present as long as they’re profitable to me, but security nonetheless.
After all, I had the idea and stuck my neck out to secure the financing, which is far more important than the actual daily labor that keeps things running.
We’re like a family, see.
Even if the assets aren’t people, not squeezing value is required to maintain some fun and life as well as long term sustainability. If you squeeze it, you might squeeze it dry. I hate all the adverts everywhere. Can I just go somewhere to save my eyes…
Capitalism
Impressed ot took this long. Every other comment is just describing capitalism working as designed, fucking over the poor to ensure a working class. Maybe do something about the torment nexus if you dont want to live under it?
Ending a price in .99 so you think it is a whole dollar less.
But it works! Supposedly. Don’t poke holes in the JC penney story.
That’s because it’s so normalized we don’t even realize it’s a scam anymore.
I honestly don’t understand that, I have always rounded up for money going out and down for money coming in. So if I see something priced at $3.25 my brain thinks $4, and if I earn $3.25 my brain thinks $3 dollars.
Ah but then you’ll also see something priced at 3.99 as 4, same as something priced at 3.25
Ive always thought it was due tax related reasons. In México, most shops have it set up so the price + IVA (our consumer tax) gives you a rounded number.
