OK I'll bite. I think your solution only solves one edge case. And there are too many other edge cases to warrant spending the infrastructure to fix one edge case.
Examples, your solution doesn't solve:
- Mugger waits for you to withdraw the money from ATM.
- Mugger forces you to withdraw everything AFTER you entered your PIN.
- Muggers holding someone ransom until you get them their money.
- You are traveling outside of your home country/unreliable law enforcement.
I don't have an opinion on the moral aspect of being a billionaire.
I just want to point out that billionaires don't just magically create more money for charities. Someone had to lose that money.
For the sake of simplicity, lets say... Goods & services were priced optimally to reduce the middle classes disposable income. The billionaire throws the poor-and-starving a bone every now and then.
Should the middle class have more disposable income? Or should charities get their bone? It's a matter of philosophy.
Being rich is being in control. You get to decide who gets your money.
Someone had to trade the money that ended up in the billionaire's pocket. Presumably they received something of more value to themselves than the money, otherwise they wouldn't have made the trade.
This applies on the employee side too: employees have the option to go into business for themselves and take their skills directly to the marketplace, but they make a choice to trade surplus profits beyond their salary back to their employer, usually for the security of knowing that they'll continue to receive a paycheck even if those profits never materialize. This was a very conscious choice for me last time I took a job - I looked at it as "Well, I'll be doing the same thing I was as an entrepreneur, but my employer bears the risk of it not working out in the market" - though I suspect most people don't think like that. It is a choice, though, and once I felt like taking more risks, I left.
You gain other intangibles being an employee... namely training, working within an industry and learning customs/norms, and meeting people.
I was an employee for years before I left to do my startup. I definitely thought about the purely monetary risk/incentive issues you raise, but I thought about many others:
- if I stay longer as an employee, will my training make my startup more successful?
- am I prepared to be alone, not relying on a boss to tell me what to do and provide guidance on my work quality?
- will I become isolated running my startup not relying on an employer for exposure?
- will being so independent make me more motivated or less?
There's no question I thought about monetary risk/reward, but it's so difficult to calculate any risk/reward with any new company. Often, all you have to go on are these softer questions that you have to answer for yourself.
>Someone had to trade the money that ended up in the billionaire's pocket. Presumably they received something of more value to themselves than the money, otherwise they wouldn't have made the trade.
That abstract reasoning seem to miss a lot. Where I live, rent is crazy expensive. Rich people own their own homes. Almost everyone I know rents, giving a lot of money to people who need it less than they do. (I don't even dream of ever owning a house here. A cheap one is >$1m.) It's like a Monopoly game near the end, all the money going one way. So sure, you could say not-being-homeless is 'of more value to themselves than the money' but it would be a weird way of putting it.
The OP referred to farm subsidies, not food subsidies. The majority of these are in the form of price floors, intended to alleviate poverty among farmers and prevent shortages by encouraging excess supply during all but the leanest of times.
The reality is, the majority of these subsidies go to multi-million dollar farms, not the small family farms. As a result, we're effectively paying taxes to raise prices on food, which is very regressive in that it hurts the poor far more than the wealthy.
Of course, the flip side of the coin is that without the subsidies, prices would be so low that small farms wouldn't be able to compete anyway. Supply would, assuming the weather cooperates, roughly match demand, and a not insignificant chunk of taxes could go towards other programs (such as subsidizing school breakfasts and lunches). Then, we'd have some bizarre mix of natural disasters that creates a severe shortage of several key crops, causing significant chaos both in markets and in the daily lives of people who like to eat food, and we'd end up right back where we started- demanding the government guarantee that we don't run out of food in lean times, and paying the price for doing so.
> Your country needs to maintain the infrastructure to self-sustain it's people in a world war.
Food wise, logistics wise or technology wise? Because while the US could manage the first two assuming no major internal disruptions, we've pretty much abandoned the third in favor of cheap imports and profits.
Sure, you can get chips within some limitations - in fact I believe some chip fabs have been moving back onshore. Can you get screens? I remember coverage maybe 20 years ago about Zenith closing the last TV manufacturing in the USA, and while that was in the days of CRTs I can't imagine that a lot of new panel manufacturers are here.
Interesting point. I'm not really seeing the bottleneck with respect to defense sustainment though.
In terms of critical defense: L-3, Honeywell, Rockwell Collins, and Elbit (Israel) are a few major players off the top of my head that cater to domestic weapon system displays.
In terms of consumer displays: Japan, Korea, and Taiwan are allies. Humoring a doomsday isolation scenario with consideration towards America's disposable first-world couch potato culture, there's probably enough TVs/monitors in existing circulation throughout the country to sustain even the most improbably protracted conflict, let alone used surplus being auctioned off by the pallet for pennies on the dollar. Might even resuscitate a dead repair trade and create a few meaningful jobs too. Of course, this all assumes the government doesn't acknowledge a supply deficiency and fails to seed the capability need.
Don't get me wrong. I agree that the status quo of domestic technology production isn't exactly a self-lubricating wheel and leaves much to be desired...but it's not exactly dead in the water either.
The question strikes me as a red herring in that it presumes an optimal solution to the obtuse problem of world war sustainment exists as some one-shot panacea.
The H word is such a lazy excuse. Techies overestimate how much the common folk give a shit about getting hacked. 99% of the population are not celebrities.
I know a bank that purposely reduce their Internet banking security. To cater for specific elderly customers who constantly forget their password. They are not going to force their customers to walk into the bank everytime.
These accounts are at a risk of getting hacked. It's called a tradeoff. As a bank, do you want customers or not? Do you like money or not?
As for the Yahoo situation. If they gave a shit about customer service: they can accept copies of drivers licence/passport signed off by a justice of peace.
Sounds like a bank that doesn't want my business. And that's fine if that's how they want to operate. But if a company wants my business, lightening security standards is not the way to get it.
Because the evidence of a MetroCard and photograph are "flimsy"?