You require a human to identity proof in real life and bind that to a digital identity with a strong authenticator. Anti fraud detection systems can suspend or ban if evasion attempts are detected. Perfect is not the target, it doesn’t have to be.
See: Login.gov (USPS offline proofing) and other national identity systems.
>You require a human to identity proof in real life and bind that to a digital identity
That's going to be a no from me, dawg. I'm sympathetic to ID checks like if you're buying beer or whatever, but not linking my real life identity to discord or whatever.
There are laws, but in many countries they are not strictly enforced. In Japan, buying beer in the self checkout lane will just give you an “are you over 20?” prompt, no verification: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46227987
I don't know how it works where you live, but in many jurisdictions around the world (including the one I live in), you have to provide ID to prove that you're of drinking age.
Which is by nature transient. There are many more and quite dangerous strings attached to doing this online. You never know if all parties involved in the verification are trustworthy.
If the options are pensions or self investment, how is one sustainable and the other isn’t? The investment dollars in scope are similar, with pensions being better managed than your average human would do.
> with pensions being better managed than your average human would do.
Only if they are. Some pensions are well managed. Some are not. Some seem well managed for years, but in fact they are not. Some have been well managed for a long time, but someone incompetent gets in power. Can you tell the difference.
Oh, and if you can tell the difference, can you convince everyone else and thus get this fixed? Or will voters be happy with the mismanagement because it is returning great results now on low investment leaving more money to spend on other things now?
In the worst case no pension (either personal/private or public) is better than a pension. At least if you have no pension you got to use/spend your money today - it didn't go to whatever the corrupt pension manager did with your money.
Before pension reform in the US I had some distant relative who was laid off 3 months before his planed retirement when the company went bankrupt - it then came out the pension he was counting on was entirely invested in the now worthless company stock. This is the real risk you need to worry about if you have any form of pension.
In principle defined contribution plans should be a good way to split the difference, although I recognize that it's a lot harder politically to make them mandatory than it is for pension contributions.
The question is who is managing the pension. Defined contributions can be a really bad deal if you can't control who is managing the money.
The other major problem with contribution is you don't know when you will die. If I'm going to die at 65 like some relatives I should retire at 50, but if I'm to live to 97 in great health like others I should wait a few more years. (family history says my expected lifespan is about 80, but it follows a statistical curve ranging between 65 and 95 - just like nearly everyone else in a "first world" country). I want a system that acounts for how long I will live and my health and ensures I have plenty of money - group pensions should be really good at that.
Most pensions are Pay as You Go systems where no investment actually occurs (or if it does it is vestigial).
Effectively no different from a regular ponzi scheme being used to purchase votes.
Self-investment has the actual investment there.
If pensions were fully-funded you'd be right, but they aren't in almost every country. Unfunded pension liabilities are well over 300% of GDP in most european countries, but since they don't show up on debt to gdp metrics, people aren't aware of it.
>The investment dollars in scope are similar, with pensions being better managed than your average human would do.
Retirement is going to be effectively pay-as-you-go no matter what you do (at least until we invent much more sophisticated robots).
You can't stockpile nurses and save them up for when you retire.
If you save money or invest in financial instruments, you're still relying on labor from subsequent generations and if there aren't enough of them, higher labor costs will eat up everything you saved.
The only way to really save up for retirement on the society-wide scale is to spend money on things that increase the productive capacity of future generations.
> The only way to really save up for retirement on the society-wide scale is to spend money on things that increase the productive capacity of future generations.
Indeed, and we didn’t do that. We invested in issuing debt and other non production capacity efforts.
Well, the current situation is equally effectively unfunded because you’ve got gains in an investment account that will be competing for a rapidly shrinking working age population in concert with large amounts of voters who don’t have investments but have a vote to vote for someone who will increase taxes to increase benefits. Pick your illusion of generational contract and financialization performance art.
Pensions are no more a Ponzi scheme than a capital market predicated on growth that will not occur due to structural global demographic dynamics. People are too bought into an abstraction while the underlying crumbles, for obvious reasons.
>Well, the current situation is equally effectively unfunded because you’ve got gains in an investment account that will be competing for a rapidly shrinking working age population in concert with large amounts of voters who don’t have investments but have a vote to vote for someone who will increase taxes to increase benefits. Pick your illusion of generational contract and financialization performance art.
You seem to have a serious misunderstanding of what the current situation is.
There is no "gains in an investment account" because social security is unfunded, and has only vestigial investments (many of which are primarily fig leaf to finance the government at lower costs/lower returns).
There won't be any "gains in an investment account that will be competing for a rapidly shrinking working age population" because there fundamentally aren't any gains.
Now, assuming that your misconception was correct, and that there was a pot of unrealized gains to be consumed when you retire... That still wouldn't cause any "competing for a rapidly shrinking working age population" because the thing about having resources is that you can spend them to get more of the things you need. Sure a large influx of capital requiring some specific goods or services would increase the price of those things... which would in turn increase the incentive to provide more of those things.
Frankly that isn't an issue if it's fully funded.
> large amounts of voters who don’t have investments but have a vote to vote for someone who will increase taxes to increase benefits.
And this is the problem.
Theft and its normalization through political power is what causes the self-funded and fully funded model to fail, not anything inherent to it.
>Pensions are no more a Ponzi scheme than a capital market predicated on growth that will not occur due to structural global demographic dynamics.
There is nothing to capital markets that requires growth. Indeed historically it is the opposite, and investors tend to overpay for growth resulting in lower returns.
GLP-1s target humans who need a pharma intervention to assist in making their reward center in their brain more defensive against the system they are forced to exist in.
We don’t need ads for it, we should hand it out over the counter to anyone who wants or needs it, but I digress.
Which evil system do they live in? Veggies are the cheapest stuff I can find in supermarkets anywhere. I agree their reward systems are fried, but thats a result of decades of over-eating on the worst junk mankind ever produced, while this whole 'evil system' screams on them from all sides how stupid and suicidal this is, how sugar is same as cocaine and so on.
Its all a mental problem (and here in Switzerland this is general consensus among doctors and I have one for wife), and an attempt to solve it anywhere else down the decision line apart from the head is just (temporarily, in case of glp) fixing the consequences.
Not every gas station, convenience store and pharmacy is stocked with aisle after aisle of cocaine. I don't know I would call it 'evil' but I agree it is a system most people are forced to exist in.
If we're appealing to authority, my mother, my father, and my sister are all highly accomplished doctors, and they believe GLP-1s will become part of a standard drug package to older adults like Statins because it's far more achievable than education we don't have and wouldn't work in the food system that exists in the US.
Yes, so let's just solve it. Okay, no more mental problem.
What's that? I didn't actually say a solution? Yeah, that's because I don't have one, and neither do you.
We can't just make people good people. It doesn't work, it's never worked, and it will never work. If you think otherwise, you are wrong. If you still think otherwise, you should think less because obviously it's not doing you any good.
We can sit here alllll day and tell people not to inject heroine or smoke cigarettes. But guess what? So long as the human brain is how it is, and we have those things available, people WILL continue to do them.
So while you have fake solutions you've made up in your head and can't even articulate, we have real solutions. GLP-1s. They work, as in they actually work. They actually help solve the problem.
So on one hand, you have an imaginary solution. On the other hand, you have a real solution. Hmm, which one should we gravitate towards? What a tough call!
> Its all a mental problem (and here in Switzerland
Ah, that might explain why you'd think that healthy food is easily available and affordable everywhere. I haven't seen what stores are like in Switzerland for myself, but it sure sounds like a massive improvement and may be part of why the obesity rate there is around 10% instead of over 40% like it is here.
Money follows ROI. Making those speculative or detrimental industries less profitable is the answer.
Regulations on micro-targeting, data privacy, algorithm transparency, legal liability for content, etc.. all push back against the externalities of ads/social media.
Regulations on energy and land use can make eg data center build outs more expensive, pressuring back against speculative AI trash.
Taxing big tech companies, subsidizing manufacturing education, and judicious import tariffs.. would all create incentives for investing money and labor in hard capabilities
If you're asking me? Workers revolution and a complete systems change, towards something that aligns incentives with the good of humanity, not of a money-grubbing few.
I have a feeling most folks here will disagree though.
Average price of a new vehicle in the US is $50,000. This is priced appropriately considering total cost of ownership delta against a combustion vehicle. Rivian needs more volume for prices to decline from manufacturing efficiency at scale.
A cursory search of the web shows that TCO for EVs in the US is higher than ICE for all but high mileage commuters. Wish it wasn't the case, but insurance alone is a 30% premium.
Insurance is a bear for Teslas. They cost a lot to repair.
The Model 3 Highland is super fun to drive. Maybe other EVs have this too. It's a very different experience to a similarly priced ICE car, and worth factoring in to the value proposition.
I specify Highland because the previous version was rattly and noisy enough to seriously detract from the zippy driving experience. Highland is nice.
NYT recently did a fantastic calculator. It isn't simple flat one or the other is cheaper. It takes into account buy vs lease, milage, local energy cost, length of ownership etc
> While drafting the fact sheet, we checked two headline policy ideas that the One Big, Beautiful, Bill introduced: the early sunset of the consumer EV credit and a new $250 annual EV fee. While the annual fee was dropped from the final legislation, the $7,500 consumer credit now ends September 30th.
> For the Equinox EV, these changes would cut its seven-year savings over the gasoline Equinox from about $9,000 to under $200. The Model Y also showed savings compared to its gasoline comparison under that less favorable scenario for EVs.
That link also factors in fuel savings which depends on where you live. I'd personally never save on an EV if it costs more upfront.
How are insurers making any money insuring these things nowadays? 30% higher premiums are being mentioned elsewhere in the comments; that doesn't sound like enough!
>How are insurers making any money insuring these things nowadays?
Because insurance is fundamentally a "skim some" model.
They have a massive pool of money. Sure the pool is bleeding all the time because they're paying out, but it's also being replenished by premiums paid in. They invest this "constant" pool of money and the return on this covers overhead plus profit.
So when we're all getting screwed on our premiums because fenders cost tens of thousands and Karens file claims for parking scratches they're making more money, because the same ROI on a bigger pool of money is a bigger number.
People keep repeating this uncritically. There is a car-debt crisis, and wages haven't kept up with house/car costs.
We have one person saying "well in Californian wages..." and another saying essentially that 50K isn't a lot of money when the average SALARY is $66K/year.
I also believe this $50,000 stat is the mean car price which is likely to be pushed up by luxury car sales that cost 2-4x what a typical car costs, whereas a median price would give a better indication of what most people are actually spending. I did a quick Google search and wasn't able to find any data on median price, though.
$50000 stat is the mean transaction price, which includes the dealership stuff that gets added on. While it’s true that it is an average, companies are increasingly not making cheaper models. Sub $30k new cars are almost a myth at this point. You get sedans and hatchback models that start in the high 20s as the base price but we all know you’re not walking out of that dealership with a base model or just paying the advertised rate. SUVs on the other hand, which most people prefer these days are closer to $40k.
To what degree is this caused by car prices versus Americans' compulsion to keep buying new cars? Anecdotally, the folks I know struggling with car payments are almost exclusively in the latter bucket. But I'm open to having my mind changed with data.
Not entirely true; there are at least the lease, rental, and commercial fleet markets supplying predictable inventory of used cars to the public market.
I have 2014 Tesla S which which I recently had drive unit and battery replaced ($20k total). my friends all think I am nuts, but they all have $1k+ payments (some for 72m) while I haven’t had a car payment since 2017 and won’t have another one till 2036 :)
If your friends dumped $20K into paying off those loans they’d be a lot closer to paid off or maybe paid off completely, though. And that’s on a newer, lower mileage car.
I’m all for maintaining vehicles and keeping them on the road, but I don’t think you’re in a place to criticize your friends with $1K car payments after putting almost 2 years worth of those payments into a car that’s over a decade old.
I have spent exactly $0.00 on maintenance since 2014 when I bought the car (other than tires, 5G modem and internal battery). not sure what “paying for the car” means, it was paid off in 2017.
to simplify the math:
1. I spent total $90k
2. to have a car from 2014 through 2035-ish
for a $1k/month that would be $252k for my friends :)
I wonder how much of this ridiculous car money was previously buy-a-house money. If you don't think you'll ever buy a house, you might as well spend it on a car.
See: Login.gov (USPS offline proofing) and other national identity systems.
(digital identity is a component of my work)
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