“Hello, can we have your liver?” – The Meaning of Life
On weekends sometimes I drink water, you know, to keep my liver guessing.
In 2018, a Goldman-Sachs© researcher asked the question: “Is curing patients a sustainable business model?” This was in relation to what should be considered great news, a company coming up with a one-shot cure for hepatitis C that was over 90% effective.
Where is the profit in making people better? As someone who depends on my precious liver to take abuse like a housewife in Egypt every Friday and Saturday night, I’m all in favor of things that keep them healthy. But it doesn’t make sense to Goldman™, because they’d much rather have me be an income stream forever than solve my problem.
This is an example of a world where the Libertarian ideals fall apart, precisely because they presume the lowest common denominator when it comes to morality in society. There are many flaws with Libertarianism, and this, along with optional personal bodily hygiene intervention are two big ones. I mean, it isn’t a violation of the non-aggression principle to request they replace the mustard-coated shirt, is it?
A friend of mine stole a lightbulb once. He said it was because he was in a really dark place.
Let’s look at other places where the free market falls apart. What about Tinder™? What happens if Tinder© brings together a guy and a girl and they fall in love and get married and stay married for the rest of their lives?
Tinder® loses two customers. Forever. It is not in the algorithm’s interest to make people happy. It’s in the algorithm’s interest to get two people to meet and not like each other. Wait, better yet, to like each other superficially enough that they hook up and then both feel hollow and empty inside, driving them to find someone a little closer to what they want.
Yes. That’s what Tinder© would like best in the whole world. Unhappy people swiping on their product, generating revenue. It’s sad, especially because a 9 or 10 guy will break down on a dry-spell Friday night and swipe on a 4 woman, bang her, and now she thinks that she’s worthy of a 9 or 10. So, she stays on Tinder™ waiting on Prince Chad to sweep her off her feet instead of out of her panties.
Tinder™ is profitable, though, so there’s that. Match Group©, which owns nine other dating apps, made about $3.5 billion in revenue. They didn’t make that much money because people got married and abandoned them. They get rich because of psychological manipulation and the destruction of fertility.
He was sad, he said she was matadorable.
Also in this group with Tinder©? Social media that feeds your outrage. I’ve written about quite a bit, and won’t retract a syllable. While we’re on software, Tinder© is freemium, but there’s worse. There’s SaaS.
SaaS SuckS.
What’s SaaS? “Software as a Service”. Remember the “you won’t own anything, and you’ll love it” soy-face guy with an expression of, “I hope my wife’s boyfriend likes this chai latte I made him”? Yeah, that’s where this fits in.
I bought Microsoft© Office™ a decade ago. I had to re-buy three years ago when I bought a new computer. Couldn’t find that pesky key. Yes, I know there are free alternatives, but it was worth it to me.
Anyway, I bought it for $149.99. It costs $99.99 a year. I’ve already made back almost $150.00. Well, $150.00 if you round up because pennies in 2026 are as common as black Cambridge© professors that can read. What Microsoft® really wants, though, is for me to be a customer forever, paying each month, like a little software child that shows up for its allowance and then runs off to the shareholder meeting.
How often do airplanes crash? Most of them, just once.
And, to do this, they’re willing to sacrifice and continually make the software worse with teams of Indians hired to, well, I guess be Indian and dispose of their trash in National Parks. How will they pay those H-1Bs in their eternal quest to make your software worse? With your monthly payments.
It’s not just Microsoft©, but many other software companies like Adobe® are out there, sniffing around your credit card.
But there was a time when at least some people realized they could get rich by being good. Crazy idea, that. An example?
Henry Ford famously raised the daily wages of his workers, doubling them while cutting the hours worked each day from 9 hours to 8 hours. To be fair, his desire wasn’t entirely due to altruism. He had to hire about 50,000 people a year to keep 14,000 making cars. In reality, doubling wages ended up lowering Ford’s© cost and doubling his profits.
There was a catch. To qualify for the full wage increase, you had to be a married man properly supporting your family, or a man over the age of 22 who could prove they were thrifty. Your wife couldn’t work. She had to stay home.
I accidently glued myself to my autobiography. It’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.
What a monster! Ford wanted to make sure that his company produced quality American families based on quality American values. Of course, he got sued.
Today? It’s a race for the bottom wage by companies that don’t see the United States as their home, just a profit center or division. And, it has spread. Universities are now attempting to hire H-1B volleyball coaches making less than $50,000 a year. Why? Because no American understands volleyball?
No. Because they can get someone cheaper. The idea is that jobs in Missouri should have wages based on Mogadishu or Mumbai. Jobs in Nevada should compete with Nairobi or Nigerian wage levels. As pointed out in the last post, when men don’t get raises, women don’t make babies.
It’s a simple way to replace a people, but only after you’ve made them poor. Medicine should make people feel better, and a cured patient, is better than one on a perpetual prescription. Unless you’re Goldman-Sachs©.
I just found out I’m colorblind. Boy, that came out of the orange!
Them? They want my liver to stop working. Not entirely, just enough that I have to pay them every month to keep it going, while using crappy software, surrounded by unmarried Gen Zers who can’t get jobs because they’re not from Punjab.
Libertarianism might not be dead, but it’s dying since the only people foolish enough to buy it can’t afford the mortgage on their liver.
I’m a far cry from a socialist, but living in this globalist, corporatist age I hardly find it surprising so many under 30s are turning against what’s described as ‘capitalism.’ David Ricardo (not our friend) did not account for the free international movement of labor when he pushed ”comparative advantage.” Nor did he consider that a sovereign nation might not want to outsource all its food production, or its medicines (but hey, Mumbai is the perfect, most sterile place to produce things).
I’m all for competition, but today the deck’s stacked in every way – who gets into which college, who gets which fellowship or internship, who has the family connections. Merit has nothing to do with success today. No, the world doesn’t owe anyone anything, but this country used to give the average man a chance at a pretty solid average life. No more.
I play online card games when I want to waste some time but refuse to pay for ‘ad-free,’ so I see endless Adobe ads featuring nothing but magic non-whites and women. I will never buy nor use another Adobe product as long as I live. All corporate merka hates me as a non-apologetic White, and I have zero corporate ‘loyalty.’ I have to do business with some companies I hate (like Walmart – not a lot of choice where we now live)- but when/if I have the opportunity to buy elsewhere, or crap on an anti-White company or exec, I take it.
Libertarianism rests on a lot of false assumptions about human nature and the world. Kind of like globalism, diversity, and every other female declaring God’s first commandment is to be “nice,” all the time. To which I reply,
“Because you are lukewarm . . . I will spit you out of my mouth.”
10 4 EVERYONE needs a trade to fall back on.
Yes. Morals matter. If the world is a marketplace, it is a hollow place.
It’s not a “market failure” that somebody isn’t buying you a pony. In a circular argument, commies invent the concept of “market failure” to disguise their envious parasitism. If you want to cure the sick, then go do that. But, nobody owes you a cure, and the service of human repair is not an exception to moral values against theft and slavery.
Didn’t ask for a pony.
Agreed that socialist medicine is akin to theft and/or slavery.
I reject both Libertarianism and Marxism.
Libertarianism is a mirror image of Marxism and like Marxism is one of those concepts that sounds good until you start to actual think about it.
Most of the Libertarians and/or Marxists that I know, are either college students or recent college graduates. Many will blame this on indoctrination in colleges which certainly can be a factor, but I knew a number of guys in engineering school (where there was no political indoctrination), who became die-hard libertarians. I think there is just something about living in the idealized bubble that is college that distorts one’s perception of reality. You are surrounded by likeminded individuals of roughly the same socio-economic class who are all pursuing the same goal (and with well established protocols). Consequently, I think that leads people into the false belief that what works for a group of college students will also work for the rest of society and so all these bad political theories are born.
Or the constant inhalation if weed. It does make people stupid.
Exactly. In a future post I think I might elaborate on how Libertarianism is the gateway to Marxism.
The moral philosophy of keeping your hands off other people as much as possible is a gateway to the moral philosophy of micromanaging everyone like they were a child? Yes, I’d like to read that elaboration.
Instead, how about Conservatism is the gateway to Marxism. First you put the Church Lady in charge so you can gloat when she ruins everyone’s fun, then she’s pushed aside by a psychopath.
A new chapter of Repairs is up today, Firefight: https://zaklog.substack.com/p/firefight?r=2nmhek
Well said, as usual.
Excellent!
The government says you can only address a problem using one particular approach, which doesn’t work very well. Instead of noticing that government has banned all those other approaches, you demand government treat citizens like green plastic army men, and set them up and knock them down according to your personal designs. There are valid criticisms of libertarianism, such as “What have libertarians ever liberated?”, but “Why can’t libertarians build a private road?” is not one of them.
Suppose you buy a strip of land 50 feet wide and 10 miles long, and go to the county commission to have the zoning changed to permit you to build a private road. What is the zoning code name you are asking for? There are codes for all sorts of purposes, such as R-1, R-2, R-3, RA, C-1, C-2, LI, HI, MU, and PUD. But what is the zoning code name for private road? The answer is that code name doesn’t exist, which means the permission can’t be granted even in theory. Libertarians don’t build roads because government won’t let them.
You should be able to build a private road. I support that right.
Ford also brought the muslims to Dearborn.
No, he just hired them.
I absolutely refuse to ever pay subscription fees for Office 365; its privacy issues cannot be ignored. So I just paid $40 on EBay yesterday for yet another install key on Office 2019 for the new PC I’m putting together. It’s probably a Chinese clone somehow; its privacy issues cannot be ignored. Sigh.
Back before they did the Orwellian language change on the definition of “vaccine”, they actually made people immune to ever having a disease and were seen as a public health no-brainer instead of a profit center. I was livid (the term for an upset liver before it is placed on a pizza – lol) when I heard that the Hep C cure shot was in the tens of thousands of dollars.
https://www.healthline.com/health/hepatitis-c/treatment-costs#antiviral-drug-costs
That’s a far cry from the economics of eradicating polio. Salk and Sabin passed up on being billionaires by not patenting their vaccines for polio.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2012/08/09/how-much-money-did-jonas-salk-potentially-forfeit-by-not-patenting-the-polio-vaccine/
I personally remember taking my dose back in the early 1960s as a kid eating a sugar cube with a purple dot on it at Oak Grove Elementary School on a Sabin Sunday…
https://douglascohistory.org/tag/sabin-oral-sundays/
…so I never had to worry about living with polio, like my older cousin Huey who had contracted it. Or like Martha Lillard.
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/last-us-polio-patient-iron-lung-dies-78-oklahoma-rcna493255
Their world has passed on into the profit-oriented one we have today. Not so sure it’s a better one.
Salk and Sabin were both Jews by the way.
I applaud Salk. Flip side, polio was in amazingly steep decline before the vaccine. Why?
Subscription Economy, fer sure. Tokenized as much as possible. TPTB want to tokenize water. Yes, water.
Back in late 2010, had it with PCs & Microsoft. Emailed an Apple Store and made a Genius Bar appt. Great decision, on my 3rd MacBook Pro. Spent $19.99 for Pages, which is their “word/.doc” program; free software updates standard, unlike Acrobat Pro, which I have to use daily (combining/compressing files, e-signature, etc.). Bought it for $299 14-15 years ago. Guess what happened 5-6 years ago? Screw you, monthly subscription now required.
Same goes for QuickBooks. Eons ago it was $49/mo. Or something near to that. It’s around $130/mo. now. Customers pay me using it, so had to change my Terms of Sale to cover their 4% charge for CC payments.
Let’s see what’s what when the economy crashes.
The plan is to digitize EVERYTHING.
Then social scoring might let you keep what you have.
And Apple made a lot of money not being evil. But they will be. Bet on it.
Why would anyone put liver on a pizza when pineapple is cheaper and tastes so much better????
Hahahahaha! Now that’s a dangerous idea. TBH, I like a good crispy Hawaiian in less than 30 minutes. Think that’s Kim Il Jung’s plan?