Defense/military is one of the few government functions that libertarians endorse as totally necessary. To many, it's the only legitimate government function.
I don't think you've thought about this very hard.
HN will make snarky comments about doing no evil and avoid reading the part where the NLRB forced their hand by classifying worker protection of subcontractors as de-facto employee status. Good job NLRB.
That case could still be appealed and overruled. And then it could go to the Supreme Court, which would likely take years to resolve. Better to be safe than sorry, rather than hope that the case will stand.
It also doesn't fix the problem where a number of contractors sue you even if they might be wrong. It could very easily be a class action lawsuit like the one that cost Microsoft a lot of money. They could use those rules as a start and then throw a few other things together such that Google thinks it might have a problem in court and wants to settle rather than risk getting sued by every single contractor.
There are two things in the article: the NLRB rule (temporarily paused) and a bargaining order from an Administrative Law Judge who said Google is a joint employer for a particular group of contractors under NLRB case law.
The NLRB makes nearly all its law via adjudication, not rules. The aggressive interpretation of joint employer is what is causing companies to put up walls between employees and contractors so they don’t get swept up by the NLRB.
I have a couple of strawberry pots by the window in my apartment. The flavor is way better than anything store bought. It's the same thing with picking and eating blueberries straight out of the bush, or from some roadside stall.
Something to do with the commercial varieties being selected for transport and size/color rather than flavor. Also I believe the commercial fruits are picked as soon as they seem ripe, while I can wait longer for them to get sweeter and I don't have to care about transportation spoiling the fruit.
The transportation thing is what I've heard as well. Basically, the fruits are picked before they fully ripen so they don't get damaged in transport. For that reason you'll see chefs (e.g. J Kenji Lopez-Alt) recommend that you use canned tomatoes rather than fresh when you can. Tomatoes destined for canning are chosen for flavor and not beauty, and are picked when fully ripe. So you will generally get superior flavor from canned tomatoes.
If you read the article, there isn't really any central planning. It's one of those "regulated monopolies" with only one (private) contractor. These kind of things always end poorly for the customers in my experience... Either go full free market or have it ran by the government.
It seems to me, based on the article, that the main issue is the profit-seeking ghouls (err.. I mean... "Job Creators") exploiting the government, its limited resources, and faulty regulations-- which are slowly being fixed.
There is ample evidence (e.g. the entire rest of the industrialized world vs. the US healthcare system) that decentralized capitalist control of the donor organ system would lead to an exploitative nightmare that would make the current system look like unassailable perfection.
Playing devils advocate, that exploitative nightmare already exists elsewhere in the world. If a consenting adult wants to sell a kidney or lung, why shouldn't they be allowed to?
“If I don’t sell my kidney,
I will be forced to sell
my one-year-old daughter.”
It's an odd sort of cognitive bias to conclude from this article that the selling of kidneys is the problem. You don't think they should be given the option of selling their kid or their kidney?
My takeaway from this article is that the market just isn't developed enough. If they were able to sell their kidneys to richer westerners then they could easily get 10x or 100x as much money.
In that part of the world that's easily enough to make the best way to extend your statistical lifetime be to sell your kidney. You'd get access to better healthcare for life, your children could get an education etc.
"Our citizens"? I didn't know the Taliban could be found on HN. You should do an AMA.
What I'm pointing out is that you seemingly only care because the proposed scheme might cause you or other affluent people to interact somehow with the desperately poor. So the knee-jerk reaction is that we should ban the scheme entirely.
But those people will still be desperately poor without it, even more so. It's really arrogant to say that they shouldn't be given the option.
Would I sell my own kidney if there was a market for it? No, almost certainly not. But I don't live in those circumstances.
But we're talking about a country where the life expectancy is around 60 years, and where people are making something in the very low 4-digit USD/yr.
It's not hard to imagine how that could be turned into a win-win if the more affluent were able to buy kidneys.
> "Our citizens"? I didn't know the Taliban could be found on HN. You should do an AMA.
The proposal is expanding this practice, correct? Permitting Americans to sell their kidneys?
> What I'm pointing out is that you seemingly only care because the proposed scheme might cause you or other affluent people to interact somehow with the desperately poor.
Ooof, a body blow to that strawman. Bravo! Well fought!
> But those people will still be desperately poor without it, even more so. It's really arrogant to say that they shouldn't be given the option.
They'll be even more desperately poor when the remaining kidney fails, they lose their job (and thus health insurance), and donor kidneys aren't available because they've all been bought up for $100k.
How is that a strawman? You're arguing against any market mechanism on the basis of a human interest story discussing Afghanis who sold their kidneys for what you'd expect to pay for a new laptop.
I'm assuming you aren't actually in Afghanistan, so I thought the out-of-sight-out-of-mind comment was fair.
> They'll be even more
> desperately poor when
> the remaining kidney fails.
Make that case statistically, how many statistical years do you lose from kidney donation with access to modern medicine?
> and donor kidneys aren't
> available because[...]
Everyone's born with two, you generally only need one, and failure is rare.
That's why it's such a perfect example for why a market-based approach could be a win-win for everyone. Nobody would die from kidney failure.
Afghanistan offers an example of the market-based approach to kidney donation and its downsides. There are certainly Americans desperate enough for a few grand in a similar fashion.
> Everyone's born with two, you generally only need one, and failure is rare.
> Afghanistan offers an example
> of the market-based approach
> to kidney donation and its
> downsides.
And upsides, e.g. the person who avoided selling their child by selling their own kidney.
Is that an overall terrible situation? Yes, but I'd like to think any parent would make the same choice.
Anyway, to respond to this and your up-thread (which I believe you added in an edit after I replied to that comment):
> The proposal is expanding
> this practice, correct?
> Permitting Americans to
> sell their kidneys?
No, let's narrowly stick to Afghanistan, since that's the example you brought up. It avoids getting into the muddy waters of introducing multiple variables.
Afghans are selling their kidneys right now, for the equivalent of around 1/2 to 1 year of local median salary. They're selling them to other Afghanis, or Pakistanis etc. willing to travel there.
Now, let's say an American dying of kidney failure was allowed to fly over that same Afghani to the US as a paid kidney donor for hire.
They'd still be out of a kidney, but now they might have gotten 20-40 years worth of the median salary in Afghanistan as a reward.
Don't you think that would be better for everyone involved?
> [<URL>] lists a number of
> potential downsides to
> donating a kidney while alive.
I'll take that as a "no" to the question about whether you're able to support your up-thread "when the remaining kidney fails" claim with any numbers.
Medicine. We're really freakin' good at it. We make a lot of drugs, and our quality is high. We invent new drugs. Our doctors rank among the best in the world. We develop new treatments, techniques, and devices.
It's access to care that we suck at, and our lifestyles aren't doing us any favors. People generally leave the country due to cost, not an expectation of better care.
My guess is that the web developer skills needed to build this website and the rail building skills needed to build high speed rail are highly orthogonal. Plus their project isn’t high speed rail, or rail at all as far as I can tell. Do you mean “building [one] actual mile of animal crossing” maybe?
It's the right direction of course but the concurrent release with Harvard sort of opens them up to antitrust probe tbh. Clearly the admission offices are all synchronizing policy in backchannels (or frontchannels).
What's the antitrust angle? SAT and ACT are administered by different companies, right? Do Caltech or Harvard have some sort of stake in either of them?
Top schools compete with each for students. Collaborating to keep prices high or keep admissions criteria consistent in a way that reduces competition between the schools would open them up to anti-trust complaints.
But that would be hard to prove. If two gas stations collude to set prices, that violates anti-trust law. But if they just follow suit as they see the other raise or lower prices, that's generally legal, as long as there isn't a secret or understood agreement. I expect the latter is more what's going on here.
But for there to be an antitrust case, consumers or suppliers must have been harmed in some manner to the benefit of the trust. Standardized testing costs are pretty low (especially compared to tuition), and they don't reach the colleges/unis.
Colleges still use race in admissions. They just obfuscate it slightly. For example, they preferentially admit people by zipcode, i.e. by the degree to which the neighborhood is non-white, non-Jewish, and non-Asian. They encourage applicants to write about their experiences with discrimination in their applicant letters. They also accept people scoring in the top percentage of grades at a school (which preferentially admits students from worse schools with lower standards i.e. students from black and Hispanic schools). I assume they use a variety of other techniques as well.
I don't think you've thought about this very hard.