I’m not saying the math shows smokers or covid save the system money in the long run. I’m just saying for smoking no one would even touch that specific analysis. I suspect it will be the same for covid.
As a group these people create very little economic value and are mostly withdrawing what they think they deposited during their working years. The main way they help is to create demand for goods and services, but that kind of top line GDP optimizing thinking is probably going to be why the world ends from climate change.
Good point. People who live longer pay taxes and contribute. So it’s not just about medical costs.
Someone’s going to rush into this thread and accuse me of being a ghoul for cheering for people to die sooner in 3…2…1…
Someone has to work in Amazon warehouses and buy widgets to keep the glorious capitalist engine humming.
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Are insurance costs not more expensive for smokers, etc? I think somone’s done the analysis. In ROW, we also tax tobacco so you pay as you go as it were
For the short term yes. For the long term it gets handed off to Medicare. Also premiums are based on expected usage in a given year, not over a lifetime.
Yeah we don’t we just have a maximum age and weight. Cross the limit and we throw you a goodbye party/funeral all in one. Good idea you large orange monster.
Btw, looking kind of big there.
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People were always mega stupid but the internet is ruining humanity. Grandpa used to have to wait for his third Saturday cocktail at the VFW to float a few hot takes about the negroes, then wait a whole week to do it again.
People are lonely. Social media gives them a sense of belonging, but Zuck and Company convert that from healthy to humanity-destroying by actively and deliberately getting people addicted to hate.
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For context for the following, I was diagnosed with a smoking related comorbity in March 2020…
If / when I get taken out by COVID, I’d still think it might be natures way of making room on a crowded planet. I’d understand nature for that. You’d expect the weaker to get taken out in any ‘average’ pandemic - c’est la vie
Self-inflicted comorbity though - might be different for others born with comorbity
Hate is extremely engaging content.
Are they getting people addicted to hate or are they feeding a previous addiction that you don’t want to admit already existed?
BO is further away from the moon than nasa by a mile. you could argue spacex is closer right now since they have the biggest rocket, but nasa is much further ahead in everything else with a dozen unmanned mars missions in progress.
That’s not an accurate way to think about addiction. I could be right or wrong about this, but the way I think about this kind of stuff is that certain people have a propensity to like a certain kind of thing.
Take me for example. I love message boards, I love food (when I was young and poor the industry term for me was ‘frequent fast food user’), and I actively dislike exercise. These aren’t strengths in my character they’re the weaknesses. Other people like the in group feeling of joining something and fighting an enemy. I hate joining absolutely anything and most people disappoint me. Some people like heroin. I’ve never tried heroin because I’m not in a hurry to find out if I like it.
When you expose someone to something that gives them dopamine they want more of it. The whole economy is built on this. It’s about finding out what you, the consumer, can be served that will create an addictive feedback loop that causes you to reach for that thing without thinking every time your brain wants more dopamine.
I don’t blame people for their addictions anymore. I’m way too aware that I have them myself. I know it’s possible to resist one because I’ve been fighting a war of attrition against the food one for years now… but I also obviously know how hard it is. I’ll probably be yoyoing my weight up and down from now until they burn my corpse. I hope that isn’t true, but there comes a point where you have to make peace with the way things are.
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I’m sure their heirs wouldn’t take the money and spend it faster, that’s never how that happens.
Look I’m totally not interested in doing the ‘what is the $$$ value of a human life’ thing, because I think it’s the wrong question. I that kind of thinking is a great example of everything that is wrong with our economic system, which seems to prioritize making the gini coefficient higher over making long term investments in the citizenry.
The system is the way it is because we are fucking fire monkeys with absolutely no idea what we’re doing. We’ve been winging it since our first big ecological disaster where we started fires to kill animals to eat steaming off the ground.
But yeah if you’re doing the old school economics of this those old people dying is probably a net positive. Which is part of the proof for ‘is our current way of measuring an economic system evil’.
I’m not calling you out specifically but it’s funny to me that even on a progressive message board this is still a common theme.
We have gotten to a place where someone’s economic value is how we measure their human value.
But NASA actually does spend enormous amounts on manned exploration. They just don’t get very good results because Boeing steals it all.
And the technology of the Apollo program has unequivocally been lost. I did a thread about it a while ago. There are new upstream technologies that could be used, in theory, to rediscover rockets capable of taking people to the moon, but that technology doesn’t exist (except, again, for SpaceX). All those planetary science missions you love were actually launched on Russian rocket engines, because post-SST NASA doesn’t have orbital capabilities anymore, except as a customer.
The Dakota strategy is basically that high stakes poker hand where Jamie Gold has KK vs Farhas Aces.
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'Rona comes close to UP -
My wife’s mother’s cousin got covid as well as her husband. Husband is currently on a vent. They’re in NY, so I suspect if he’s on a vent it’s last ditch effort to keep him alive.
We aren’t very close to them, I having met them once and my wife having only seen them once in the last couple of decades, but regardless, it’s in the extended family.
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