A couple of house owners discussing putting solar heating on their roofs because the government launched a subsidy for it and one of them heard about it. With the subsidy the panels would start giving a modest return on the investment after an estimated 25 years. These people had no interest before in "green energy".

A young wife being asked by her aunts when she's going to have kids. The answer: I have to finish my degree, then work for at least two years so I can qualify for the maximum benefits when I go off on maternity leave. In the context of getting that degree and job for that specific purpose.

The most boring of all was listening to small business owners and their endless small time scheming with putting everything as a business expense to deduct on their taxes. I'm all for not paying a dime in taxes, but what kind of life do you end up having?

So the above is just life, everyday life for everyday greedy people. That's why I wrote give me the American flavor of greed any day. That greed that goes into creating things like the high tech stuff discussed here on HN every day.

This is an interesting form of market distortion of volition if you will where the confines of self interest take on somewhat strange shapes under specific directed ends and incentives offered by government programs. This is in contrast to unspecific non-directed open ended ends of a free(er) market economy letting self interest take on whatever shape it will unprovoked.

I wonder if that open ended structure encourages or at least gets out of the way of people who do the creative value producing thing. Interesting thoughts about the mental path of least resistance and where the thoughts of a subpopulation find themselves when shaped and prodded in a certain direction.

So you know. Same thing except all that money flows to the top, and the bottom still has to think about medical bankruptcy.

For all the good and bad, a service like Uber could never have been invented in Europe. I remember when it was accepted that taking a taxi was just for rich people.

“Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.”

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...