The claim was incorrect. They are included. That's fundamentally different than claiming some kind of issue with how this information is calculated for cars.
This is true for people in the middle to the bottom of the pay spectrum in the US. From experience where insurance paid ~1 million for a significant healthcare expense and my out of pocket was $4k -- when you are in a field with such a low unemployment rate and generally good benefits, it's a non issue. The month premium we pay is a non-issue. The maximum out of pocket is a non-issue.
That being said, the way healthcare is paid for in the US is complete garbage for basically everyone that doesn't have that same (more or less) guarantee of employment (with benefits) and is a huge problem. It just isn't for upper middle income (and above) workers.
Same with college. In my experience most SW engineers in the US make enough money to drop money in some kind of investment account for their children monthly so that college isn't so burdensome unless their children go to the absolutely most expensive places or they have a ton of kids.
Again, it's the people in the middle and bottom that are getting screwed. The top 20% of earners in the US come out ahead i think.
EDIT: I'm not advocating this as a positive thing or anything, just noting that I think SW engineers in the US have a pretty good gig compared to many other people both globally and at home.
There are also the the equality of opportunity issues that still exist for cultural reasons... which seem like obvious things to correct. For example, having a "black sounding" name on your resume causes you to not get called in for interviews as frequently.
The analogy isn't really 1:1 in the first place. I see plenty of people wearing cross necklaces every day, which is more equivalent to wearing a shirt with an upside down pentagram on it. If the Satanist started wearing shirts with hateful stuff about other people, fire that person too.
Do you think there are (per capita) more or fewer software developers today than there were in 1980? I kind of think the inverse of your point is true, to be frank. On a per capita basis, I think it's it likely that way more people understand the fundamentals of computing.
I just think software has made computing more accessible to people that don't know the fundamentals, which I think is a good thing. I don't think operating computers should be a gatekeeping exercise where you can't use it if you don't understand what machine instructions are, or c.
I don't know that we can predict today what people in the future will view the incentives to be, but its certainly not impossible that the collective view of the bitcoin community might shift towards some change on that front.
I'm not saying this is the only solution, but if having no block rewards really threatens the existence of bitcoin, and a regular inflation rate were deemed to be the beset way to solve that -- the cap on the number of coins isn't actually immutable. There would be a hard fork in that case, sure, but if that's where the people went, that's where the value would go.
Keep in mind that the miners would have some incentive to back a change to that cap. Every block reward would be extracting value from the non-mining users and distributing it to themselves -- similar to the inflation tax we face with normal currencies. It's not inconceivable that they could drag the user base along with if it was seen as existential. A 2% inflation rate is better than the collapse of something holding a significant fraction of one's wealth.
Yea, difficulty would drop. You'd end up producing a block more often than every 10 minutes. There's probably some lower bound on difficulty (and block frequency) that also maintains network consensus.
It's not inconceivable (to me at least) that at some point in the future it would be politically or personally beneficial for the leadership of a totalitarian government to do something that is economically costly to it's citizens (in this case we're talking about damaging bitcoin, but it could be anything).
Yea I can't see a power like China controlling bitcoin to be a good thing. I also can't see myself maintaining a substantial fraction of my wealth in a unit of value subject to the whim of a totalitarian government.
It's not inconceivable (to me at least) that leaders could decide it's personally beneficial to them (or politically beneficial) to damage Bitcoin, even if it cost a ton of their tax payers money.
It's an unsolved problem, and all solutions would require a majority of the mining pool to get on board.
You could periodically increase the block size, splitting the transaction fee among more transactions. Although larger blocks make it more difficult to produce hashes, so more power would be consumed, thus increasing the transaction fees further.
You could change the block reward such that there's a larger block reward or even some kind of sustained rate of inflation. The cap of 21 million bitcoin isn't a fundamental unit, it can be changed if a majority of the mining pool decides to.
You could switch to Proof of Work, which doesn't use nearly as much electricity. Given how long this has taken Ethereum, this would probably be a multi year effort.
If the Lightning network were to take off, it might also help with this for day to day users. I'm not super confident about that though. I don't think a Layman is going to deal with the Lightning network, personally. Especially with the current narrative of bitcoin being a "store of value" rather than a currency. Bitcoin proponents don't seem to be advocating using it as a day to day payment tool.
Of course, there could also just never be any consensus on the direction to take, the network could be attacked, people could bail on bitcoin for other cryptocurrencies or just abandon cryptocurrencies all together and it could become a relic of history.
And yet people still own dollars. I own various investments, and also dollars.
I'm aware of what a hard fork is, I'm also aware of what a 51% attack is. The risk of that down the road could be a fair amount of incentive for folks (and the network effect) to get on board. I'm not saying something will happen there. You do need to maintain clarity to understand the reality of what's possible though. It's also possible that bitcoin's first mover advantage is overcome at some point.
As I said, I own some cryptocurrency too. It's important to see through the mania that is the current market.
And yet more people use dollars, and have bank accounts with dollars or their home country's currency.
Bitcoin's block reward can be changed as well, it's not some immutable law of the blockchain. I'm not claiming that it will change, but I also see the potential for there to be a change there to incentivize mining once the block rewards are minuscule and miners are dependent on transaction fees for profitability.
So I own some crypto too, but the dollar has a much larger social network effect of people who agree it's the store of value for the future, no? So does the Euro. It's a bit weird that you would claim that bitcoin's intrinsic value is that it's a store of value, but then deny the same reality for other traditional currencies.
Do you think you might be understating the probability of failing in business, and overstating the odds of getting laid off? It's not like many businesses haven't closed their doors during the COVID pandemic.
I also doubt the percentage of startups that fail in a given year would compare well against the number of people that get laid off in a given year.
And having 100 customers doesn't help if losing 10 means the business is no longer profitable.
"Since most full-time jobs involve a single employer — it’s a one single point of failure — meaning, you just need your employer to fire you to lose your income.
With a business, you usually have more than one customer and in the majority of cases: tens, hundreds, thousands, and even millions of customers who are your revenue source"
This claim is so overly superficial that it's not helpful. The percentage of businesses that fail is way higher than the percentage of people that get laid off in any given year, typically. And it's not like businesses haven't struggled to survive during COVID-- just as much as any employee has lost their job. Losing 20% of your customers can be the difference between the company surviving or not, it's not like that just means you lose 20% of your profit.