Having more power makes it easier to lie, cheat, steal, inflict pain, or otherwise engage in bad behavior. …Having less power means being at the mercy of someone more powerful. …Being at the mercy of another person means feeling one cannot get away from them, because they have something one wants badly and that something is not readily available elsewhere.
Now for the pricing plan. HUD already has rent-subsidy programs that cover up to a third of rent. The big California cities also provide rent subsidies. For instance, in the opening quote, Major Breed’s rent subsidy plan worked out to $6,000 per year per housing unit. That’s pretty reasonable. But subsidizing residential hotel units would be even cheaper. Check it out…
Consider: San Francisco had 65,000 residential hotel units in 1910, compared to around 19,000 units today. These were teeny rooms (typically 8 x10 feet) with barely enough space for a bed and a dresser (bathroom down the hall) but at least they offered shelter and safety from the streets. Many of the individuals who lived in these units were single men with problems that plague the chronically homeless today: substance abuse, mental illness, disability. Just like today.
The difference is they had a place to stay.
Empathy is also associated with ingroup bias and outgroup antagonism. One is more likely to feel the joys and sorrows of some people more than others, especially if they’re the same ethnicity.
The placebo effect has also been found in interventions designed to improve cognitive functioning in areas such as intelligence, attention, memory, and self-control.
Per the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were 195,530 chief executives in 2018, with a mean annual salary of $200,140. That doesn’t seem unfairly high, given that the mean annual compensation for physicians in 2018 was $299,000. But the CEO pay that gets people riled up isn’t what run-of-the-mill chief executives get, it’s the CEOs pulling in millions working for the top companies. For instance, the $14 million average annual compensation paid to S&P 500 CEOs…
The basic theme in these stories is that college has become so expensive that students increasingly rely on loans to fund their education and the resulting burden of student debt has kept millennials from realizing the American Dream of home ownership and wealth accumulation…. I decided to investigate the matter further.
I’m going to concentrate on cutting health insurance spending, which consumes 75% of US healthcare expenditures: a whopping 2.6 trillion dollars a year. Some considerations…
RAND Corporation analyzed the cost of hospital care across 25 states and found that hospitals, on average, charged the privately insured 2.4 times what they charge Medicare patients. A separate study by West Health found that private insurers paid California hospitals more than two times as much as Medicare paid for similar services. Private non-profit hospitals charged the most for privately insured patients.
In 2016, US life expectancy was 78.6 years, compared to an average of 82.2 years for comparable high-income countries. Most of the difference is due to “excess” American deaths before the age of 40. By the age of 65, the disparity in life expectancy between the US and the other rich countries is just 1.6 years for women and 1 year for men.
Note that economic freedom and government regulations are perfectly compatible, as long as the regulations are “necessary to protect and maintain liberty itself”. Of course, that wording invites a whole slew of questions, such as…
To make matters even worse, most of the developing world is moving to beef and cows wreak much more environmental havoc than chickens and pigs. Unfortunately, this trend is likely to continue at least for the next couple generations. Which is a long time if you’re an endangered species.
The Goal: preserve biodiversity and prevent extinctions. The Means: habitat management. …Types of Habitat Management include: …
Headline: UN Report: Nature’s Dangerous Decline ‘Unprecedented’; Species Extinction Rates ‘Accelerating’ UN Sustainable Development Goals. May 6, 2019
Excerpt: Current global response insufficient; ‘Transformative changes’ needed to restore and protect nature; Opposition from vested interests can be overcome for public good
Moral outrage makes ends absolute: This must stop! That must happen! No ifs, ands, or buts…. Governing wisely is about setting priorities, a process that assumes scarcity: the principle that valued ends require scarce resources with alternative uses.
Quick to label and condemn, today’s paranoids seem to have a quasi-religious concept of irredeemable souls - souls that must be cast out of society because nothing good comes from commerce with the devil.
According to the Social Security Administration, 3.1 million undocumented immigrants paid Social Security taxes in 2010, about half the undocumented workers in the country at the time….
According to the above quote, bigotry, addiction, and violence are responsible for rising social instability. So how are bigotry, addiction, and violence trending?
Think about it: around 10% of non-elderly Americans are uninsured. That’s almost 28 million people. But US healthcare costs could be 25% lower if the above reforms were implemented. Then the US would have a healthcare system where everyone is covered and everyone’s paying less.
The problem: chronic homelessness, defined as being without housing for at least a year. It’s estimated that almost a third of the homeless are chronically homeless.
The mission: Figure out a way to house the roughly 10,000 chronically homeless in the San Francisco Bay Area.
A possible solution: …