My friend got the gas turned back on, but not before paying for PGW's mistake - to the tune of $600. I hope he gets that money back with a little extra for hardship.
Imagine if you could build inexpensively built homes that would be extremely affordable. Think about just how many people you'd piss off by doing this. You'd piss off construction unions and real estate investors. Now you see where all the pessimists and cynics come from. In reality, the real estate market can't stay this way forever. . .
Just stick that alongside the plot of that Keanu Reeves vehicle Chain Reaction.
These ideas also enter health care as well. That industry is a little bit more complicated as it involves insurance companies more. Is the American Disablities Act actually enforced upon insurance companies? A person with a terminal disease still needs healthcare.
My grandfather didn't believe in life insurance. Which ended up costing my family a great deal of money. The thing with life insurance is that there's not much risk involved as you will die - eventually.
National optional insurance? Perhaps the government could provide some kind of optional and minimal coverage of the "necessary" insurances like health and car. That way no one gets left behind because their employer won't enroll. Yeah I know, who's going to pay for it. I think Bill Gates should pay for it instead of buying Wintel computers for schools and then writing it off as a donation. Buying the OS that he makes for schools is too much of a win-win situation for Microsoft to have it really be humanitarian. He's just trying to get impressionable youth addicted to Microsoft Windows.
Insurance companies - necessary or evil? Evil, but the vast majority of people are under the impression that it's necessary. It is not necessary to humanity's future. Money is also evil and unnecessary, but the world isn't ready to get rid of money or for world peace.
1 comment:
Actually, I think they do build inexpensive homes that are extremely affordable. They're called trailers, and people live in them in trailer parks. (They're quite popular where I'm from.) And yet, the real estate and home construction industries aren't quivering at the thought.
I think your scenario is an over-simplification. Apply what you said to cars. By that rationale, shouldn't Kias and Hyundais (among the least expensive cars) be the runaway most popular brands? And yet they're not. Homes, like cars, are more than a necessity item in this country. They're status symbols. And people will pay for that status.
Plus there's the notion of "you get what you pay for". People like to pay more for what they perceive as greater reliability/durability/etc (whether it's true or not).
My conclusion - people (or at least Americans) don't want cheap homes any more than we want cheap cars. It'll take a lot more than that to start a revolution.
Ross
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