Uh, a new Bell 407 is north of $4 million and that's before it's equipped for medical flights. You aren't buying one of these for $500k used, at least not one that's air worthy. Eurocopter EC135 are a bit cheaper, but not by much.
And yet we have ICE and the FBI harassing “dissidents” every day, medical choices dictated by insurance companies, and on and on. They’ve been sold a bill of goods and just haven’t realized it yet, IMO.
This applies to other things as well - retirement and education come to mind.
Anecdote: my uncle and BIL are auto mechanics. One in the US, the other in Scotland. Similar lifestyles - both own homes, have mechanical hobbies (vintage cars for one, Harleys for the other) - typical working class lives. The uncle in the UK just has much less mental overhead when it comes to major life planning.
Sunscreen is the first thing that pops to mind. Until last week(?) we hadn't had a new sunscreen ingredient in decades, despite the RoW getting newer/better stuff for years. It was to the point that tourists to Korea and the EU would stock up on product to bring back.
Yes, that (roughly) happened because the FDA regulates sunscreen like a drug and RoW mostly treats it as a cosmetic. And FDA drug approval is expensive, so nobody was bothering.
Regardless, for those of us with pasty white skin, it kinda blows not being able to get a good daily sunscreen that doesn't make us look even more ghostly.
EDIT - Yes, the FDA needs to exist, it's WAY better than nothing. But, it's probably due for some reform.
Not to mention it ignores reality. Most consumers have neither the time now knowledge to research everything they buy. That's one of the roles of government.
Is Flock really 3rd party? Yes, they're a private entity, but they largely owe their existence to government contracts. They maintain their database on behalf of various governments. Their primary sales pitch is to law enforcement. It feels like something completely different than Alphabet's or Meta's databases of person/user data.
I do agree that Flock is also not the same as the database of cell phone location data that Verizon or Apple or whoever else might maintain.
It's somewhere in the middle, IMO. At least to my non-lawyer brain.
Yup, exactly. My gut says we don’t price the externalities correctly, so Amazon is able to route for faster deliveries (“Get it by 5am if you order by 10pm”).
One issue is Amazon doesn’t appear to optimize for “fewest trucks trips to the block” - we’ll see 4-5 Amazon trucks/couriers on our cul de sac every day (plus USPS, UPS, FedEx, DHL). That’s for 10 homes. If Amazon was able to do one truck to the block, that would big a big win for fewer trips/less emissions. Probably.
For starters, there's a discrepancy between the age of majority (18 in the US) and Meta's age limits (13, which are tied to a different law - COPPA). So there's a ~5 year window where Meta could design the services to be addictive to minors.
Amateur motorsports has a similar concept - often called a "claim rule" or similar - in an attempt to control costs.
Basically, for $x amount, a competitor can buy the winning car (or its engine, or similar). Where $x is the amount the group decides should be a reasonable amount to spend on building a car.
A racer is free to spend more, but if they win too much, somebody will write a check and buy the car.
In theory. In reality, plenty of people have the money to spend $x^2 and risk the loss.
In a vacuum, I agree. But, license plate readers aren't limited to investigating crime/misuse of vehicle, nor are they limited to the government.
Tracking vehicles and linking that movement to individual movement (and spending and browsing and and and) used to be massively expensive, if not impossible.
Now all that tracking is "cheap" and being done at scale for all sorts of reasons.