akramachamarei

On the steps of SCOTUS, not Congress, curiously....

Readers would appreciate downvoters clarifying their displeasure or disagreement with the above.

It's not clear if the profit motive alone explains it. I think a huge difference between the social media business model and most other profit incentivized enterprises is that because most it is free to use, customers pay with attention. Methinks there is most overlap between the attention getting parts and the harmful parts of recommendation algorithms.

It is not rude to point out that an insubstantial comment, which in particular falls foul of Hackernews guidelines, likely comes from a sublogical mental process. I regret my apparent failure to promote introspection or further inquiry into the issue, but I suppose the rockheadedness to which I reacted would prevent this anyway for the foreseeable future.

Well, yes, that's kinda the whole question of accessibility. The proportion of people who e.g. can't distinguish colors or use the stairs might be a rounding error in some populations. We still find it valuable to strive to serve them. Some of this has been expressed and thus calcified into regulations.

If the comment baited you, maybe it's because you're holding onto a popular but nonsensical belief system, and you're experiencing painful cognitive dissonance.

Shhh don't ask that. The authoritarians are here.

I'm beginning to think you don't understand the words "argument" or "woke" either.... But anyway, I'm merely pointing out for the sake of readers that insurance companies are engaging willingly (and very gainfully) in this arrangement, so as to not oversell the power of the collective bargaining enabled by uniting coemployed health insurance buyers. I guess I would just question whether this collective bargaining is working quite well for us employees (the self-employed have it better.) I may be in a collective, but I don't seem to have any influence within my collective whatsoever over which insurance company I have. This is like a union with no voting. No bueno.

I'm also curious (since this is closely related) whether you favor the tax break to employer health insurance. You wanna talk about my woke focus on words, well well, take "externality." I'm not familiar with these bad externalities of the institution of employer provided insurance of itself, but I can see negatives from the tax break. Namely, by subsidizing my employer's health plan, my private health insurance purchasing power is effectively nerfed. Bit of a stretch to call that external.

...What do you mean "cap"?

> Soviet programmers invented it in their spare time when they had access to computers, as enthusiasts. What did capitalism add?

Capitalism created the computers whose Soviet copies were Tetris' native platform, it made the languages Pajitnov used and the machines he ported it to. It incentivized people to bring Tetris to the rest of the world, and who knows, it might have spread on its own eventually, just for free, but maybe not.

> All of the inflation we've seen from the pandemic has been the "raising prices" part.

Superficially true, but vacuous. In anyway that matters this is flagrantly and amazingly false. But maybe you weren't aware of the $931 billion US dollars of stimulus paid to individuals, or you may not be familiar with the principle of supply and demand. More dollars in supply, the less the value of each dollar. Prices change to match the devalued currency.

> Being expensive to access out of employment is a feature not a bug.

I think this may qualify as a bug, to which you can credit the Revenue Act of 1954 for codifying the tax break given to companies who provide healthcare directly rather than pay that money as income to the employee. Classic example of a stale law. Now, vested interests may be keeping it in place, but I also see no significant awareness on the voter side of this issue nor the will to reform this discriminatory tax policy.

Are the Americans in the room with us right now?

> the experience has been […] uniformly poor […] Any positive interactions and outcomes have felt like happy accidents

Which is to say, not uniformly poor?

> I'd also love to do away with tax prep — the government knows what is owed

Sometimes! We would probably have to simplify the tax code first. Otherwise instead of spreading out the work of identifying income and tax credit eligibility amongst taxpayers and such upon them who are most proximal to this knowledge, we would have a centralized body need to know all of the things that you and I know about ourselves, such as how many kids we have, what kind of car we drive, whether we use solar power, whether we invest in crypto, whether we earned money from gifts or gambling or dividends or farming. Or we could just simplify the code, which I would like.

> You can force insurers to cover folks they wouldn't want to otherwise by bringing more customers (employees) to the table.

The word you're looking for is "convince," not "force." This whole discussion is replete with misuses of words like "free" and "force," and it's a little worrying.

(Which you might be able to see)