Sure. But you also have to realize that a loaf a bread cost a nickle and that cards didn't exist. People carried around change because you could actually buy meaningful stuff with it and there wasn't really an alternative to cash (sure someplaces give credit but much different than using a card today).
Another thing (and that actually matters much more) is that tax is not included in the prices there are excuses about it that tax is different in different areas, but it's just yet another way to lie to a customer.
Even after I graduated and got a series of increasingly high-paying engineering jobs, I couldn't shake the scarcity mindset, and I would scrimp and save (although I didn't skip meals any longer!). In time (with a whole lot of help and encouragement with my wife), I was able to largely overcome it. We're still very conservative with our money--we're probably in the top 10% of Americans with respect to income, but we spend like we're median (or lower) Americans and save the difference. However, now it's because we want to retire early or pursue other loftier goals (some combination of traveling the world, buying a hobby farm, and/or starting a small business) rather than my debilitating anxiety.
(Since we're getting a little political) It also makes it hard to sympathize with my peers who didn't work, skipped class, lived in the dorms, paid for meal plans and still went out to eat several times a week, bought daily $7 lattes, and majored in some art history or leisure services or (non-teaching) English Literature when they insist that the government should forgive their enormous student loan debt (I'm fine with universal education, but no one should be surprised that they have to repay the debt that financed their unsustainable lifestyle or demand that society foot the bill).
Or at least that's my experience from living in an area where hurricanes sometimes take down power for 2+ weeks.
When things shut down for a long time the government usually sets up free distribution of MREs and water and already having gas in your tank is more valuable than having cash to buy gas at the theoretical gas station with power to pump but not payment network access.
If we needed to leave due to an emergency, some cash may help for a hotel, probably, assuming it's far enough away to have power/water.
If there's earthquake/hurricane/etc with resulting power outages, most of the places I'd go to wouldn't be able to even open their POS systems to take cash in the first place.
Businesses or anyone wanting to get paid will figure out an alternative. Dealing with cash is not complicated.
2 hrs later, the regional manager - WHO HAD TOLD US IN NO UNCERTAIN TERMS THAT WE HAD TO REMAIN OPEN DESPITE NOT HAVING POWER - came in and chastised me for 1) not wearing the full uniform (we had no AC and it was July, so I took off the tie) and 2) handling money without a register. "You can't guarantee your numbers are right - that's what computers are for". "But... they're down, and you said to stay open and keep selling". "That doesn't change the fact that you might be making mistakes!"
Insanity.
Cards require a machine, some kind of network connectivity, and an account. It's actually a lot easier to deal with as a small business. Most of the people I know who go to conventions as vendors prefer cards because it greatly simplifies their logistics.
In the case of getting paid something versus getting paid nothing, I am guessing most merchants will opt to put in the work to accept cash rather than shut down.
There are attacks where bad guys will disable a gas station's dish (by covering it with foil among other methods) and then rack up a bunch of gasoline sales with a stolen card. They've got generally got a limited window so they have to hit a bunch of local stations quickly, but meth users aren't known for high dollar scores.
It apparently comes from a survey [52] which says:
"53% could manage an unforeseen expense of $500 without worry"
What that actually means isn't directly stated - but people read it as "half of Americans can't afford $500" which isn't what it's stating.
https://www.personalcapital.com/assets/public/src/2022-Wealt...
My intent was to show that while electronic payments are nice and convenient, I still like the peace of mind of knowing I have a resilient payment method like cash on me.
1. leave me with cash
2. not affect the ability of shops, hotels, etc to process those cash payments and render goods and services
3. prevent me from driving to the next town, county, etc
I also did not have time to drive 1+ hours for supplies, especially when roads were not necessarily cleared of trees and whatnot, and I had elderly to take care of at home.
Also, gas itself was challenging to get with very long lines so driving an hour was not a guarantee to getting it (since everyone else has the same bright idea, you can’t just shift 10M+ vehicles worth of demand overnight to surrounding areas).
Yup. As a child of immigrants it gets passed down a very long way.
Pass it down far enough and it just becomes “culture” and “tradition”.
Care to explain it to non native speaker from Europe? Is it some bakery chain and she took home some cheap/free leftover bread?
I read "breadbasket home" as a compound noun and guessed it was some kind of food bank or something, but "home" was really an adverb modifying took. So what was meant was something like "My grandma ... always took [home] the bread from a [restaurant] breadbasket..."
It might be buttery, lightly seasoned bread or something like rolls, usually fresh-baked.
Charging for saving lives. Price discriminating to save lives.
What happens when they make a mistake in what someone is able to pay?
EDIT (I tried replying but can't yet): The basic solution to make medicine cheaper is supply more medics.
In Chile anybody who wants to be a doctor can go to some medical school and make a pretty decent wage (but less than 20x what an American doctor makes) and help people in some role, some specialty, if that's what she really wants to do.
No quota on helping people.
And they get better results, lower infection rates than American hospitals, longer life expectancy, and medical school is shorter and much cheaper, like night and day. In particular maternity care is like the best in the world--I can't corroborate that but I've heard that.
Lowest medicine costs in the OECD, blows every other developed country out of the water. America is the most expensive and Chile is the cheapest.
10x cheaper, and longer life expectancy.
It's shocking how little this is talked about... This is so obviously the root of the problem. People like to blame the free market but there is no free market in medicine. Corporatism is to blame for artificially restricting the supply of doctors and artificially restricting who is allowed to render medical services, both of which benefit the corporate members, the doctors. Of course, those anti-competitive measures are always sold under the guise of protecting the population.
https://www.ama-assn.org/press-center/press-releases/ama-fun...
Fighting residency expansion: http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2005-03-02-doctor-shorta...
Fighting expansion of care to other types of practicioners: https://www.ama-assn.org/practice-management/scope-practice/...
Why would you believe the AMA's line on this? Do you think the professional association that represents all doctors, one of the highest paid and influential professions in the country, has no power to control the amount of residencies are funded by the government? They have no reason to increase the number of doctors, absolutely none. They benefit in every way from having constrained supply.
By the way, that expansion of 15000 residency positions barely puts a dent in the number of doctors we are lacking[2]. But yeah, a press release from 3 years ago really absolves them of guilt for sure.
[1]: http://www.cnn.com/HEALTH/9708/24/doctor.glut/ [2]: https://www.washingtonian.com/2020/04/13/were-short-on-healt....
Most other private sector professions don't require nearly as much postgraduate training before being allowed to work. Prospective lawyers usually take the bar exam less than a year after graduating from law school. Medicine is simply more complex.
What would you propose as an alternative to the status quo? The AMA has proposed a number of improvements, but perhaps there are alternatives?
Also blaming "corporatism" is basically just a meme at this point, because it is just used by libertarians when someone criticizes capitalism. Its the same when communists say "true communism has never been tried".
In case of life or death emergencies, your insurance or ambulance driver would send you to a reasonably priced doctor, and doctors that charge unreasonable prices would go out of business. But my guess is that life or death emergencies do not account for most doctor visits.
> Also blaming "corporatism" is basically just a meme at this point, because it is just used by libertarians when someone criticizes capitalism. Its the same when communists say "true communism has never been tried".
Well, I don't feel like arguing about semantics. Feel free to call the problem I described however you like.
Again, what incentive would there be to lower prices? New doctors could just be bought out and the prices jacked up. There are a lot of industries where there is little barrier to entry (for example tech), where the big companies just buy anyone trying to "get in on their territory".
Also, why would the "unreasonable prices" (what would that even look like?) doctors go out of business? They could just provide some kind of "luxury deluxe" ("no poor people here") state of the art care for people who can afford it.
[0] https://www.healthcare.gov/health-care-law-protections/docto....
Emergency services are only like 5% of costs, anyway [367]:
> The percentage of U.S. health spending attributable to the ED has increased from 3.9% (CI, 3.9%-3.9%) in 2006 to 5.0% (CI, 5.0%-5.0%) in 2016.
So the other 95% is more flexible. I know when looking at birthing costs they could vary wildly but it didn't really matter because who cares, they're all in-network anyway.
[367] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
There is no cost problem in "tech". In fact, many services are literally free of charge. Despite Google having a near-monopoly on search, it is unable to charge users for it. Demand for software developers has grown massively in the past decades and yet, wages have only slightly gone up.
Anyways, I didn't mean to start a debate on the merits of free enterprise. I was hoping that we could at least agree that artificial limiting the supply of doctors causes medicine to be more costly, regardless of the economic system.
But Google can charge their "actual" users, i.e. advertisers quite a bit, and it is much harder to do any advertising without also advertising on Google Platforms, such as Search, Maps, Youtube, Adwords, etc. The wages may have only slightly gone up, but the profits definitely have gone up quite a bit, which shows that amount of workers and their pay has little to do with how much money can be made (which I believe is perfectly fine, because tech is not a place where I think free markets create a detriment to society).
I don't want to start a debate on free enterprise in general, just to show that free enterprise is not a once size fits all solution. My argument was just that the supply of doctors has very little to do with the price of medicine, because the market forces that determine price and can lead to lower prices in some markets do not work correctly in this market.
The statement is a reaction to blaming free market economics when the reality is a scenario of the opaque third party payer system in a highly regulated environment. Consumer gets no price transparency, state regulatory boards made up of current market suppliers control market entry - say what you want about it’s appropriateness but the US medical industry hardly resembles a free market.
“Corporatism” may be a ham-handed way to call this out, but it’s not helping society to lay the medical industry’s problems at the feet of capitalism. This problem of cronyism in markets (especially) exists in communist economies as well. It’s throwing out the baby with the bath water.
Most first world countries have a solution for this already. It is baffling that the US does not.
Even second and third world countries have implemented this solution.
https://www.fraserinstitute.org/studies/waiting-your-turn-wa...
All healthcare systems impose some sort of rationing. Canada rations care by imposing long queues for non-emergency cases, with significant variations between provinces. Affluent Canadians frequently travel to the US as medical tourists and pay for treatment out of pocket in order to skip the lines.
There are also major differences in MRI scanners. A 3.0T unit can produce higher resolution images than a 1.5T unit, and this makes a difference in patient care quality. Countries like Chile are more likely to have the cheaper units.
There should be flying ambulances, like international flights taking emergency patients to where they can be treated economically instead of getting signature after signature squeezed out of them, one per hour starting inside the ambulance.
This is exacerbated in the US itself, where only the top 10% have access to expensive and timely medical treatment.
I would argue that, at the very least, Canada does offer medical treatment to everyone.
The Fraser institute is a libertarian think tank so even if their data is right I don’t trust their conclusion. So what if 3% of people are waiting on a procedure? This needs to be apples to apples compared to other countries, per capita healthcare spending, life expectancy before drawing conclusions
I just happened to have this RAND corporation ranking of "most expensive insulin in the world" from 2018 handy; America is first, Chile is second.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/cost-of-i...
But I don't know, did you try the municipal pharmacy in Recoleta? Way cheaper.
[1] Note for admins: this is not the same as calling someone a shill on the forum, I went and gave my account and signed an affidavit in the complaints and suggestions book, with the help of the guard who also witnessed the shill, and backed by a third witness who conversed with the shill like I did. I told them by all means use this in court, I'll vouch on the witness stand, and I'm doing this with the same moral authority and motivation of being a hero according to Roman Law, in a very similar set of conditions that led to my actions and consequent recognition as a hero by the victims in the spur of the moment, ten years ago.
That, BTW, is a consequence of the system responsible for selecting and influencing those in power and not any particular individual, so voting in someone new won't change anything. And that goes for much more than just health care.
The only real solution is to completely abolish privatized healthcare. No more discrimination between the poor and the rich when it comes to something as critical as that. When everyone has to row the same boat, then the rich will finally have a good reason to make sure the poor don't drown.
EDIT: I don't remember Chile having that much cheaper healthcare, either. I lived there for 14 years and it was just as much of a constant drain on my salary as it is here in the US. And those who couldn't afford good insurance were pretty much screwed, just like here in the US. And the real costs were buried deep and obscured by insurance waffle, just like here in the US.
Yeah. Because rescue workers, fire fighters, EMT's, nurses, etc., etc. don't count. (As if the ways in which America's medical establishment treats those people didn't make that obvious enough. And the alpha sociopath in the room always deserves 100% of the credit for anything good happening...right?)
My impression is that other countries (ones not poisoned by the AMA) don't have this particular problem nearly so much.
Some days I feel like driving up to McLean and burning banks down.
EDIT: I'm out of comment quota but dymk I'm so tired of hearing that, here's my reply: Oh fuck off. I make six figures and work remotely. My family lives in a rural part of a small state and I can't afford a house within driving distance of them.
EDIT2: Asset price inflation pops an asset price bubble? Who taught you economics? They should be fired. Also, that's not a bubble this time, it's the market equilibrium. We aren't building enough housing and it's so bad the cost of labor to build more housing is going up. The entire US is the bubble this time.
EDIT3: Is that your solution? Send all the children to therapy for being kicked out of their own country? How do you expect that to work?
EDIT4: corrral: when the upper middle class ends up in "lower class" conditions you usually get guillotines.
That being said we are strained to buy a 3-bedroom house like that of my single Mother who only has a high school education to her name.
Given our success, we don’t have the “burn it all down” mentality but I fear it building in many of my friends and totally understand the sentiment of this being a #1 problem for younger generations.
From that perspective, nothing's changed except that some people living in those expensive places are starting to realize the same thing, and the people experiencing that are a bit higher up the economic ladder than before. Welcome to the lower classes, folks. Don't worry, you've got plenty of company.
Decent properties, in suburban areas, at ~$1M.
Ir rural areas, yeah, they're cheaper … and salary would get "adjusted" the moment I try that.
https://apps.realtor.com/mUAZ/313q9jxa
That's just one example but you can find thousands of similar listings all over the country. Outside of high-cost coastal areas, housing is still fairly affordable in most of the country.
That particular property falls pretty squarely in the "exception proves the rule" territory for me; it's a 135 y/o dwelling, so I expect you'll be paying more than the immediate price tag. Like too many listings, it doesn't come w/ a floorplan, and with what photos it gives I'm a bit suss on the 3bd/3ba (piecing together the photos, I think we've converted a second story apt.'s LR into a BR?). It's certainly seen a remodel (although … IDK about the taste of the remodel. But let's say taste is unimportant!) No driveway. The backyard is … well it needs work. You're still batting $2k/mo in Cleveland.
I'd almost hazard a guess that my CoL adjust would be >$500/mo, but I don't get to know these things, being an employee.
There are a few intangibles in my situation that make "move to Cleveland" a "it's not going to happen".
There's a point where one needs to step back and ask oneself, if that's what's affordable on SWE's salary, what's affordable on a baker's salary?
Anyway, the point is that people on HN who have relatively high incomes and job skills, and still complain about lack of affordable housing are mostly just being picky about location. There are options available but it might mean living in a area with shitty weather or not being able to walk to trendy restaurants or among neighbors who don't share your political views. The real housing crisis is hitting people with much lower incomes who are being squeezed out.
I guess if you're somewhere insanely expensive and won't go somewhere that's not, then... you're gonna pay a lot for housing. Go figure. "Here's the 97% of the country that's not like that, just throw a dart at a US map and you'll probably hit a place with much cheaper housing"—"No, I won't, because reasons"—"Uh, OK then, kinda sounds like a choice, good luck"
/s but only sort of
I don't even worry about this anymore; I look forward to it.
https://wtfhappenedin1971home.files.wordpress.com/2021/12/un...
Ultimately, we can do both (fixing healthcare and housing). But honestly more countries have solved healthcare than housing.
As someone who is (a) a millennial and (b) has a chronic medical condition, I need medical care WAY MORE than I need to own a house. Or even rent a house. A crappy apartment will do. Right now I live in a relative’s basement.
I’ve learned to settle on living situations that I don’t love because medical care takes priority.
I stand by my statement, healthcare is much easier to solve (we have examples of places doing it right). AND we can try to tackle both.
Edit: No Australia is mostly White with the largest minority (5%) being Chinese. Try again. Also, I'm done empathizing; I'm warning/threatening everyone.
Australia, for one, does a massively wonderful job with healthcare. My friends there, young by the way, love the healthcare there. But, like us, the housing market is awful. Well, worse honestly.
And this is one of many countries who have great social healthcare.
I don't think you're talking to me in good faith though given you've fallen back to "most of us get by just fine without healthcare". I'm young, like you, and I need healthcare. Plenty of my friends do too, especially some with rare conditions like narcolepsy.
Did you honestly accept in an earlier comment that plenty need healthcare?
It sounds to me like you want someone to confirm your viewpoints rather than to talk / learn / empathize with others.
Fight club: people fed up with the system decide to blow it up, release date movie 1999, book 1996.
Millenials: people born 1981-1996, thus a critical mass hits adolescence when Fight Club is released.
Millenials, except the affluent or very early ones before '83, were also the generation to see the 2008 financial crisis undo their entire Life's hard work (several times now) due to a broken and rigged economic system and were left to internalize how rather than address the corruption and malfeasance the very people who destroyed the Global economy were rewarded with bonuses and golden parachutes. Corporations were bailed out while people were forced to default on loans and forced into bankruptcy and were literally forced out of their homes: some who had already paid for them no less, because of arcane investments instruments like MBS and CDO that were so over-leveraged that they made the entire world' economy implode.
What's really f'd was that some of us who had to take time from our studies to focus on this saw it coming: I probably broke that 10,000 hour mark on studying Global finance and economics in 2007 by the time I was taking my upper division courses in my undergrad. I couldn't make sense of my degree because I realized by my junior year we were not just going to enter another temporary recession but that the entire economic model was based on short term thinking and gambling: derivatives and (re)hyptohetication were all that made the credit expansion possible. Unfunded liabilities, derivatives Markets and dark pools exceeded the Global GDP by many times!
Instead of focusing on the adverse affects of cytokine production in my experimental models, I was learning about Basel I. Instead of focusing on the long term implications of RNA-synthetase in possible therapeutics I had learn what the Glass-Steagall Act act was and why it would have to be violated to keep Goldman Sachs afloat etc...
I can keep going, but the point is: this wasn't about being an Edgelord quoting Tyler Durdan this was about the systematic and wanton destruction of the institutions we were FORCED into since birth; people also seem to forget that millennials represent the most Schooled generation that is walking this planet, I was coaxed into a head-start of sorts at age 2 and almost never had a semester where sports or extra curriculars/Summer School weren't involved until I left University at 23 as we were told this was the only way to get ahead in Life. We were also the first generation unable to expunge our University debt, all previous generations could and routinely did in order to get ahead for their advanced degrees, and these were for seemingly trivial sums compared to the immense increase in costs from that period assuming their were any costs at all: many universities in the CSU system were no cost for residents most of its existence.
This had cascading effects all over the World and with the advent of ubiquitous wifi connectivity we could see first hand the devastation of it happening in real-time.
I still recall with great clarity how austerity being imposed on Greece had children having nothing to eat and literately passing out form mal-nutrition while the EU stripped it's public assets away while rushing to get to my biochemistry finals because I had to work in catering in order to feed myself because I couldn't eat more than once a day otherwise.
I remember how JP Morgan, led by Blythe Masters, were consolidating their stronghold in the Global commodities Markets that spiked the cost of food that led to the Arab Spring after having been bailed out years before with NO ONE going to jail.
I also called the largest bankruptcy in US History (at the time) in 2007 a year before it occurred in what can only be called regulatory capture and blatant corruption by the SEC/FDIC and JP Morgan when it took over Washington Mutual: who I was a customer of.
So, your over simplification is not just vapid, it's insulting to our collective intelligence: we have more in common with our grandparents in terms of being scarred by artificial crisis after manufactured ones that only end up enriching and serving the most corrupt amongst us: to this day the fact that Nancy Pelosi still hasn't been indicted is testament of who this system really serves.
This is how I know that, even if we miraculously fixed our medical system tomorrow and outlawed private health insurance by a constitutional amendment, we'll still have, thirty years from now, 60-year-old Millennials dropping dead of preventable causes. The American healthcare system has already killed millions, but it's also killed future millions.