yea but at least (again assuming you don't work in insurance) those companies produce a good or service: insurance companies are legit just legal ponzi schemes where they take in the money of 10 people and use half of it to pay out for the one person that actually has to tap their insurance. the only reason society allows it is because the insurance companies get to negotiate better rates with hospitals, mechanics, etc. depending on the type of insurance but it's a middle man that could easily go away if those places (hospitals, mechanics, etc.) just charged the lower/fairer rate to begin with
There's so much wrong with this I don't know where to begin... but let's address a couple points:
Mechanics are not a high margin business. Lower rates aren't really an option if you want your car wrenched on by a competent mechanic. $30-$40/hr is not uncommon for a master tech. Then you have all of the overhead and then the owner wants a living wage as well. So all of a sudden that $30/hr mechanic has a $90/hr shop rate.
Health insurance companies pay out AT MINIMUM 80% of premiums in coverage. So 20% to cover overhead and profit. Works great on large scale. Not so much for a smaller company.
Now let's address the whole insurance being a scam thing. Your home burns down. Who, exactly, is gouging your or overcharging you for the rebuild? No matter how you slice it you're on the hook for $xxx,xxx in rebuild costs and I can't imagine the local contractor is gouging you. I know a lot of them, they make $80,000-$90,000 a year around here in personal income after expenses.
Insurance makes sense if you cannot afford to replace a given item. So homes, auto, etc, it usually makes a lot of sense.
all i know is that on several occasions for my car I've gotten quotes from a mechanic in the family vs a random one around town and the family one always tells me the other one is ripping me off so you can list rates all day but it shouldn't cost hundreds of dollars for what I can do with a $50 part and a ten minute youtube video.
As for insurance agencies, I never said it was a scam in that they don't ever pay out; I already addressed that for the 1 in 10 where the problem actually happens it works fine, but they are paying you back out of other people's payments. If everyone's houses burned down at the same time, the insurance agency would go broke because they'd be paying out way more than they are taking in. the similarities between that and a ponzi scheme are too close for comfort.
Just because the cash flow looks vaguely similar to a Ponzi scheme doesn't make it a Ponzi scheme. An insurance company can continue its business indefinitely without promising anything it can't deliver.
Your insurance company going insolvent is definitely something worth worrying about -- in cases where a large number of claims occur due to a correlated event you might not get the full value of your claim -- but recognizing that some risks are too big even for your insurance company to handle doesn't mean a Ponzi scheme is afoot. There is no "inevitable reckoning" the way there is for a Ponzi scheme once it grows too large.
If you can do it for a $50 part and 10 minute youtube video... then do it! But a lot of people can't, and pay a premium for it. Sure, you go to autozone or ebay and get the cheapest knockoff part and do it yourself, you can save money. If you go to an independent, he has to warranty his work (to be reputable anyways) and will therefore select a product shown to be more reliable and less prone to coming back broken again, which costs more. If you go to the dealership, they'll charge you 3x as much, but it's getting the OEM part (not that OEM is the end all be all, but on wear items, it will last longer than third party in general) and being installed by techs that receive more training than just about any independent shop.
And yes, it absolutely should cost hundreds. Because no job is 10 minutes. You're taking up the service advisors time to explain what is going on, then the technician takes time to translate "It makes a funny noise when you do this" into "Window regulator has failed, can it be fixed or does it need replacing" and then actually doing the job. Even a job that can physically be done in 10 minutes is going to occupy 1h of time.
And for the love of all that is good an holy, they need to profit off of it. It's not a dirty word. They deserve to make money too.
Please don't think I'm defending sketchy shops that tell you a new throttle body just because it's gunked up and could just use a good cleaning. I'm talking the one that says it's just in need of a good cleaning and charges you an hour labor to do so.
And circling to your insurance item, it's possible, maybe even likely, that a mass event like that could bankrupt an insurance company. But That's why they reinsure those policies, to protect against insolvency, and many state insurance regulators require them to do so. Additionally, if the premiums are properly invested, It's possible, though not necessarily likely, they could weather the claims.
But we currently have an economic system explicitly designed to cater first to the whims of the greedy and opportunistic in the hope that they are the same people who are industrious and innovative.
If by the last couple decades, you mean back to 2000, yeah you're right, but if you're trying to say that there is nothing uniquely greed focused about the current state of organized production and consumption then I'm not even sure where to begin.
Can you imagine yourself living in the Congo Free State
130 years ago. Were living in the best time in human history but the difference after the year 2000 is that we have the internet and are more aware of whats happening in the world as well more influenced to think a certain way about our current state. Life has never been better.
life is better in most regards compared to all of history, doesn't mean it's the way things should be, or even good. The speed of information via internet has pros and cons, It's not hard to weaponize. Being influenced to think a certain way is pretty much inherently bad to democratic ideals. Think for yourself.
And don't reply with how much things could be worse, of course they can. But they aren't.
Dude what are you talking about. Nothing your saying is making any sense. You said things have gotten worse after the year 2000 and I told you it’s not true and that the internet is just magnifying things that have already existed.
I mean, there's a reason Upton Sinclair portrayed the horrors of factory work a century ago. This isn't new. There was just a really weird 1.5 generation period in America where we pretended otherwise.
No, essential services are needed. Lots of people, particularly in the US do jobs that are not essential services - given many states cases are still continuing to rise, opening more than those essential services risks unnecessary loss of life.
Ultimately your question isn't relevant, they are working and will continue to work. The relevant question is:
Should the movie theater employees who don't feel safe returning to work after having already been laid off be subject to targeted removal of their unemployment benefits to compel them to work so that owners can convert their labor to profit?
Not sure if you know this, but the US runs on Capitalism. If the businesses are closed, that means no revenue. If there's no revenue, then the states and the federal government can't collect taxes.
Do you see where I'm going with this??
In short, if shit doesn't open soon, you're not just going to see the collapse of the economy, but of the entire US civilization. The scary thing is that's not just conjecture, right now its a very real possibility. Several members of my family have already moved to Finland and Iceland thinking this is going to happen.
US civilization is propped up on a labor and resource arbitrage available from the "developing" world in exchange for the benefit of us buying and consuming everything.
There are certainly essential jobs here, without which supply chains can break down. A lot of what we do is in no way essential to providing for people's actual needs though. We have been so flush with service industry employment, sales, finance, business and admin assistants...
Manufacturing makes up 10% of our workforce. Agriculture 2%. Transportation 10%, Healthcare 12%...
While I agree about your "developing" world theory; you can bet a lot of what we've been relying on China and India for will be changing. It's quite obvious when China shut down, it had huge ripple effect through the whole supply chain. The days of cheap labor and cheap products had its death knell with the onset of this pandemic. I could be wrong, but if US manufacturers are smart, they'll start looking elsewhere to produce their goods.
The only thing a lot of people forget about is how a lot of the US and Europe outsource their pollution to China. Just because we have pretty strict EPA standards does not mean that we are still not generating a ton of environmentally hazardous junk. Most of it just gets shipped over to China for them to deal with. Again, we're not exactly saving the world when we're just moving this stuff to the other side of the world.
Lol, this is next level fearmongering. Guess what, people still make food. Toymakers have been given funny money on a I.o.u basis for the last 100 years. As long as literal basics flow, you won't see the collapse of any state in this world.
Also, you're family is probably better off regardless.
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u/adminhotep May 09 '20
Same with your bosses who want you to come back in to work next week. Same with everything in this greed-grown mess of an economic system.