I think you’re still missing the point - it’s NOT classic supply and demand because the mechanism by which that works is prices, and in many healthcare markets including the US — the buyer isn’t the payer, and shortages lead to rationing (via wait times) rather than increased prices, so often increasing supply doesn’t change prices even as it increases aggregate costs (because there’s still excess demand and rationing).
For this argument to work you have to believe that decreasing the price of service delivery wouldn't decrease the price of health insurance. Provider costs dominate US national health expenditure, like it's not even close; it's not a full order of magnitude difference but it's close to one.
But part of the provider cost is driven by the availability of money to pay, which is part of the reason why drug costs are so much higher than in the US. For example, the doctor has no strong incentive to prescribe less costly drugs since they don't pay. The patient don't know any better and aren't the payers either. The insurance has some control over what they will pay for and how much but except for some cutting edge treatments, it is very hard for them to say no. This is part of the reason why insulin in the US is so expensive and why drug companies advertise to doctors and patients, etc.
I think in countries where the health care costs aren't as astronomically high as the US there is some form of government intervention to distort the market. And the original post is more or less arguing for a market distortion that doesn't rely on simple price signals to bring costs under control. But that is very different than what has happened in Denver's housing market.
Drug costs are also a small percentage of the national health expenditure, which is dominated by procedures delivered in hospitals and outpatient clinics. I don't accept the logic you're using for drugs, but we don't reach that question until we figure out why the single largest health expenditure in the United States has no impact on health insurance costs, which are the primary way Americans interface with the health insurance system.
If that expenditure does impact health insurance costs, then the rebuttal given above about increasing the supply of doctors not improving affordability fails.
If you google [National Health Expenditure spreadsheet], there's an annual spreadsheet that has includes an incredible amount of detail about where we spend money, broken down in a variety of different ways.
> For this argument to work you have to believe that decreasing the price of service delivery wouldn't decrease the price of health insurance.
I think we are talking past each other. My argument is not that lower prices for medical services wouldn’t lead to lower insurance costs. My argument is specifically that increasing supply doesn’t necessarily lead to lower prices for medical services. It would be quite a finding if US cities with more doctors per capita have cheaper medical services but if anything the opposite is true
You have to spend large amounts of time finding clients and being a salesman as you sell yourself and your services to them.
Once you do that, you have to prove that you're the person you promised. Unfortunately, most clients reaching out to freelancers are very....difficult.
After you've done the job, you have to be your own accountant and billing department. I should mention here that collecting from a lot of clients is often a frustrating endeavor and you will almost certainly be scammed at least once (at which point you have to do the math on handing most of your profits over to a lawyer and risking getting a bad reputation as a legal risk).
Because you're contracting, you are on the hook for higher taxes than normal to cover stuff like social security. Unless you are getting bottom-dollar insurance (the stuff with a $10,000+ deductible where you still get bankrupted if your medical bills are bad), you are probably paying tens of thousands in health insurance.
Want holidays, vacation, or just a day off? That means you are missing a paycheck (at least missing a bunch of billable hours) and may have upset clients. If you need to make $100,000 at a corporate job, then you'll need to charge at least $150,000. If you want to work a normal 2,000hr/yr, then you are going to have to sell your client on $75/hr while they're seeing $25/hr or less from some overseas "talent".
Also don't forget that lots of the highest-paying jobs aren't open to freelancers. Even if you contract, you'll be going through an agency charging big money then giving you a tiny fraction of what they take in.
After I got married and had kids, I was busy enough without running a business. I want to spend time with my kids while they are still kids. I may make less as a FTE, but I work a lot fewer hours and have way less work stress.
I accept the pay I'm offered not because it is based on the value I add, but because I know I'm getting screwed over and have no real recourse. Businesses have all the power whether you are trying to negotiate your FTE salary or a short-term 1099 contract.
If US programmers were to organize into a union and add some level of credentialism to keep out the fake programmers with no skills, I'm fairly convinced that you would see salaries increase dramatically.
Instead, because there's no unified representation, you get Microsoft laying off 9,000 people then (allegedly) trying to apply for over 14,000 H1B visas to suppress wages even further knowing there's nobody able to speak out against it.
It’s uncommon in the US because freelancing means having to source your own - usually both expensive and crappy - healthcare.
It used to be incredibly common in the UK - half the decent devs in London were contractors making 2-3x what permanent employees made. It’s now uncommon because the government nerfed it with IR35 rules.
Probably something along the lines of "if you only have 1 customer you're an employee"…
It's illegal in most of EU but several countries do not check. So I know PWC in italy hires external contractors but tells them to be in the office at 9 and so on… just a scam to not pay sick leave, parental leave, vacations and pension basically.
Devs are often either not good business people and/or don't want to be. Freelancing, in any industry, involves a lot more than just doing the actual job.
Also, as others have already mentioned, salaried with is much more stable.
At least these are my primary reasons, and those of some others I've spoken to on the matter.
Also a lot of value add comes from corporations which produce things of complexity greater than the sum of their constituent parts.
If you already have a platform in use by the entire world, that matter of scale makes it much easier to find value adds more than a sole proprietor could ever dream of.
It's for these reasons I'm wary of talking about "value add" only being from the developers directly implementing a feature. Without support, IT, security, Product, HR, etc, I could not deliver that value add.
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It’s impractical to “repossess” phones so in practice the carriers wouldn’t be able to stop people from deliberately defaulting on the contract with no repercussions (they can bring it to a different carrier who is indifferent)
It is 100% an anti theft mechanism - it prevents people from stealing phones from carriers. The scam is:
- get a new iphone from tmobile that costs $30 over 2 years.
- don’t pay them anything: you just got a free iphone. Tmobile is mad and won’t provide service to that handset because you stole it from them.
- You open a new line with at&t and tell them you’re bringing your own phone.
Carrier locking prevents this. If someone steals your phone on the train that’s a different problem with a different solution
That is a weird take which is not informed by an understanding of how business operates.
It is 100% an _exclusive dealing_ mechanism. (This is a term of art for a business strategy which may not be legal in the current context, by the way.) It was undoubtedly implemented because it's a way to make more money. Businesses love imposing exclusive dealing. It can reduce their competition and increase their margins. We have businesses all over the American economy doing it.
Now does this particular case of exclusive dealing also serve to reduce theft? Perhaps it does, a case can be made. But what is 100% certain is that anti-theft was not the motive for doing exclusive dealing. It's the other way around. The FTC recognizes that. Any nominally honest judge or business executive would recognize that. Anti-theft is an afterthought compared to the billions in profits at stake.
This is incorrect. You can pay off a phone early and simply ask that it be unlocked - the carrier will happily comply because you are no longer a credit risk. You can also just purchase phones unlocked by paying cash upfront. You don’t need to be a genius to deduce how this works.
The imei blacklists for theft were created much later and aren’t honored globally
Where are they not honored globally in the first world bar Romania and Africa/China?
iPhones are effectively rendered useless even with IMEI blacklisting due to the iCloud tie-in. When stolen phones end up there, the receivers on the Asian end try and guilt/shame/social engineer the original owner to unlock from iCloud - but there's basically no technical solution.
For those that claim 'oh but the OEM parts resale value only' need to keep up with the news:
Back in 2012 there were international agreements which required us cellular carriers to enforce locking phones. Those may have been unwinded by now but it’s not a simple “just force the companies to do it” scenario
A) This isn't what OP was asking about. They're pretty clearly asking about stolen devices from a consumer, not consumers stealing devices from carriers.
B) Your take is complicated by the fact that there actually is a secondary market for locked phones [0], so this isn't just about people rent-to-owning a phone with an explicit installment plan.
My point is that carrier locking is about managing credit risk and fraud, not an evil plot to trap customers, and not a mechanism for discouraging street theft.
It’s only complicated if people conflate issues or fail to understand the mechanics of carrier locking. You can just call up a carrier and ask to have the phone unlocked and they’ll oblige if its paid off. Sometimes people confuse carrier locking with imei blacklists, which is for stolen handsets. Sometimes people confuse phones with modems or firmware that only work with specific carriers as “carrier locked” but again, that’s not the same thing
They're essentially extending credit lines to people they know nothing about. Sounds like they should just stop doing that. Their "lock down the phone" solution should be illegal.
That sounds like a speculation on a tangential benefit instead of the major consideration in locking phones. The carriers can blacklist any phone's IMEI at any point (in addition to the usual collections attempts, credit reporting etc) which achieves the same effect but better if a phone is stolen from them.
It’s not speculation - this is literally why cell phone locking was invented. The imei blacklists were created much later specifically for theft, not to manage credit risk of customers getting subsidized phones.
You can literally just call your carrier to ask how to get your subsidized phone unlocked. There’s no need to speculate- it’s not a secret!
To be fair, that was an argument that was put forth by carriers years ago (at least in Canada). That said, I don't think it has popped up as much (or at all) in recent years.
So your average phone costs $700-$800 retail new. Cost of repossession would be going to court, court costs, lawyer bills etc. I would end up costing $5000+ for a piece of used goods that is worth $300 if they are lucky.
19h's comment that started this sub-thread is a perfect example of the horrible state of civics education.
I'm not an accountant and I definitely don't know taxes properly either, but I do know enough about taxes to know that businesses pay taxes on their net profit (gross income - losses = net profit). Those losses can be payroll costs, costs of goods, shipping and handling costs, rent, loan payments, insurance premiums, equipment purchases and upkeep, travel and lodging expenditures, and so on.
Assuming that the losses are legitimate and can be audited if necessary, this is not tax evasion and to baselessly accuse anyone of it is literally defamation.
Presumably you weren't planning to do that when you set it up. But sometimes people do lose money, particularly if they took a risk. If you take enough risks, you'll probably always have some losses ready to be realized.
Brilliant. I own some Bed Bath and Beyond stock. I was going to sell it for a ton of money, but now that the company is bankrupt, I can sell it for practically nothing and avoid taxes!
You probably can. You wouldn't have bought them strategically for that purpose of course.
Most people probably pick a mix of winners and losers. After you find out which ones were the losers, then I guess you can cash them in to lower your taxes strategically. I think that's the idea.
...depends on the jurisdiction. In many property taxes aren't based on the last transaction price, they're based on what the city assesses the prices as. Selling the property for $1 won't affect the value of the property, unless all the other buildings in the same area do the same thing.
>- Money laundering? Check.
Except property transfers are public information so it's obvious what's going on.
Current organizer of Data Community DC here. It's a lot of work to get a sponsor, and they tend to churn after a year or two when the individual advocate moves on.
The best sponsors know the value of long term community engagement. Bad sponsors are more transactional, and want to really see the short term value they get.
