Today, society is sick, and we, the people in it, are sick too.

The issue is that what is best for public health, and what is most profitable, are often completely at odds with each other.

And then since almost our entire society is oriented around maximizing profits, with absolutely no regards for the negative impacts on public health…

Almost everyone ends up stressed out, tired, trying to manage chronic issues, anxiety, burnout, depression, addictions, obesity, and so on.

When the profit motives get involved, and doctors are in it for the money, and drug lobbyists are in it for the money, and pharmaceutical companies are run to maximize the profits of a few, and not the health of the many… 
Well then you end up with doctors overprescribing opioids, and enriching the Purdue family while a public health crisis is made even worse.

And it’s not just medicine that ends up sick and twisted in that way by the profit motive. 
The transportation industry pushes for a car centric society and not walkable cities and bike lanes. 
Pollution overall is quite profitable, plastic is cheap and competitive, so almost every company sells plastic stuff, and the public health issues with microplastic pollution being everywhere, including our blood, are kind of brushed aside.

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Food is kind of important if you want to stay in good health. 
Fresh fruit and vegetables are good for your health, we know that.

But also, perishable fresh fruit are a nightmare for the food industry. It’s not just much harder to store fresh produce, and to deal with logistics, when you switch over to processed junk food, it’s also less satiating so you can sell more, people are willing to pay more, it’s more addictive, it makes more people come back, it’s less work, you can piggyback off the ads from the junk food companies and display their logos to lure people in, and so on.

Making a restaurant that sells some kind of fresh fruit and vegetables based stuff is overall very low profits. Replace the veggies with something like fries from the freezer and oil and salt that store a long time, and you can increase profits. Replace the fruit with sugary artificial fruit flavored ice cream from a big brand, advertise it with one of their signs, and you can increase profits. 
Push people to drink a cocktail, some alcohol, or a soda, instead of tap water, and again, profits increase while public health outcomes decrease. 
After the salty junk food, you can offer a dose of caffeine, and push people to eat a big dose of sugar, and again, that’s where the profits come from.

You could start off in the restaurant industry, full of hopes and dreams, imagining that you’ll make people slightly less sick than the rest of the junk food places. But when every other place is using all the tricks they can to maximize profits, and rents and costs are increasing, and many customers are more attracted by junk food than by veggies… Well, either you end up kicked out of the industry by market forces, or you end up broken, having to make concession after concession, inevitably driven towards being a provider of addictions, considering whether adding a tobacco machine might help drive traffic, wondering if you are allowed to install a one armed bandit, or sell some kind of gambling addiction or something, just trying to find some way to make ends meet.

When adding extra sugar and salt to everything increases revenue by a lot, then in a profit-maximizing economy, if you want to be part of the food industry, you end up forced to do it.

When there is a guy selling drugs, and another selling salad, the guy who is selling addictions can increase prices much more, and get repeat customers much more easily than the one selling salads. There is more money to be made cooking meth or making coffee and serving alcohol, than you can make from cooking a healthy vegetable soup.

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What is the education budget spent on teaching people healthy eating habits, vs the budget spent on ads and marketing for junk food that makes people sick?

One is much less profitable than the other.

How is your job organized? 
It’s probably a for-profit corporation. 
So your breaks are kept to a minimum regardless of the impacts on your health, you might have to pee in bottles, or go through “crunch time”, and both your mental and physical health are likely going to be sacrificed at every opportunity in order to maximize profits. You’ll be treated as a human resources, to be strained to the maximum, and then discarded if broken. Schedules and deadlines will be set without regard to how much stress it causes you, just based on what is presumed to maximize profits. You might get something like free access to caffeine in order to boost your productivity, and you might get stuff like emails or phone calls during your free time, weekends, and holidays. 
Sometimes some efforts might be made to keep some people from burning out too quickly, but it’s a purely profit based thing, based on how much it would cost to train a replacement or automate the job. If a pizza party here and there helps cut down on turnover costs a bit, it can happen. 
But overall, straining people, and then discarding them and trying to replace them with someone fresh, young and dynamic if they ever stumble and can’t keep up, is just the normal way of doing business, of maximizing profits.

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High inequality and poverty leads to more health issues, diseases, addictions, lower life expectancy and so on. 
It’s very well studied, if instead of ensuring that everyone can have a decent standard of living, you give all the money to a couple of wealthy people, and have everyone else live in poverty, public health declines.

But it’s also just the way that the profit motive distorts every industry.

Sports is supposed to be good for your health. Moving a bit, doing soe exercise, great idea, no?

But then you add in the profit motive… 
And then instead of sports being a kind of physical exercise that you do in order to remain healthy, it morphs into something that you watch on TV while sitting on a couch and consuming junk food, a way to sell you merch, and get you to drink more beer, something to gamble on, something that warps the entire college and education system, something where even the athletes who manage to resist doping themselves too much end up strained so hard that it becomes unhealthy.

And once broken, they too are discarded, and replaced by young and dynamic fresh blood.

When sports isn’t just something you consume on TV, but participate in, that’s the ideal that is sold: Sacrificing your health trying to make some millions, before being discarded once you break. 
Getting famous so you can turn around and push some products onto people who watch you.

Some old guy who is doing regular exercise via sports, and keeping in good physical shape until late in life? It’s not what maximizes profits.

When some exercise is done, then with the for-profit motive, that too becomes distorted.
There isn’t really much money to be made in telling someone that they can exercise topless, but selling them some fancy specialized sportswear, and all sorts of weird gadgets and machines and shakes and supplements and powders and so on, subscriptions to treadmills, that is more profitable than a walk in the park.

Instead of getting bike lanes, you end up taking the car to go pay a subscription to use an indoor bike, and a bunch of people trying to convince you that it will all be for nothing if you drink a glass of water without any added supplements.

It’s a whole for-profit industry, it’s not for public health.

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You as an individual, when you make choices, maximizing your long term health outcomes, or minimizing your short term costs, are going to be at odds with each other almost all of the time.

For any company that has employees and customers, same thing, public health and short term gains in the next quarterly report are at odds.

For any government too, investing in infrastructure that improves long term mental and physical health outcomes is directly at odds with doing austerity politics, and/or trying to maximize tax revenue.

If people take the bike lane to the public park, and then do some exercise there… It means you pay basically nothing for that trip. There isn’t really any profit being made, or much money changing hands, buying the bike would be the biggest investment, but it’s not much.

But then some of the people drilling for oil are not needed anymore, profits drop there, the gas station is less profitable if you use the bike, the fitness industry is not getting a subscription from you, no tax is being paid there either, no profits, no employment. 
You can drink some water from a public fountain at the park, and again, if you are not drinking some soda, or gigantic coffee, or some exercise drink, or energy drink, or something like that, it’s entire industries that vanish, tax revenue that crumbles away as the addictions to sugar disappear.

If you are less sick and obese, then that’s again at odds with the healthcare industry, and the profits of the pharmaceutical companies.

If you are privileged enough to be in a place where you can still buy seasonal fruits and vegetables from some local market, and you do that, well that’s horrible for the junk food industry, and the fast food places, and the supermarkets and other retailers, and the shipping industry, and the factories who manufacture the high fructose treats, and so on.

Every addiction that you abandon is an industry that suffers, and a lost opportunity to profit.

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Today, society is sick, and we, the people in it, are sick too.

Because the whole thing and almost all of our behaviors are oriented for selfish monetary profits, and not maximizing public health, meaning our own health.

Maximizing profits means that people always trend towards scams, selling addictions, subscriptions, ineffective band-aid solutions, and even creating problems, manufacturing needs, insecurities and so on.

We sell addictions and junk food and debt to each other, we all end up poor and sick, with only a couple of people sitting on big piles of money.

But if anyone suggests changing anything… Well, it threatens our jobs, our income sources! 
It threatens our lifestyles as isolated fattening people who are collecting addictions and subscriptions and chronic health issues of all kind. 
It threatens profits, passive incomes, tax revenue and power for politicians, it threatens the financial system, and the profits of every industry. 
It threatens the status quo.

Most people just don’t really want to envision a world where we do anything else than selling each other addictions, and creating problems so we can sell solutions and subscriptions, and where people are not constantly threatened by violence and expulsions and foreclosures and getting fired, and strained and pushed 40+ hours per week.

Everyone trumpets around about the value of “hard work”, as if having some time off and spending it with friends and family and taking care of your health was some kind of a crime, people are accused of the sin of laziness if they suggest we could all work less and be better off.

You must work hard to create addictions and sell junk, so that you can then afford to buy your own health problems, consuming as much stuff as possible, until it makes you sick, and leaves you broke, and/or broken.

It’s declared to be the one and only way of life, the very best use and distribution of resources, and making us all very wealthy.

The solution to waste is central planning. That can cut down on trillions in wasteful spending.

Taking a step back, and looking at the big picture.

But if you don’t do that, then you can’t even identify the waste. 
Then you end up like DOGE: Looking at a 7 trillion dollar budget, and struggling to find a couple billions in waste. Having to exaggerate in order to pretend that you managed to find 1.5% of waste. 
And with most of these cuts being to stuff that is useful.

The DOGE way is useless. 
Even if it wasn’t just a completely corrupt thing, where a businessman is getting to cut funding on the agencies that regulate him. 
Even if they actually did try to find waste, and not just to find ways to further enrich Elon, it could never work. 
You’d struggle to find 100 billion to cut, and it wouldn’t make a dent in the deficit. 
It’s like if you get a 1% pay raise: What good does that even do you if costs are going up by 5% per year?

If you want to cut trillions, then you can’t scrutinize every department individually, you need to look at the bigger picture.

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Imagine some government in a third world country has loads of people without access to clean drinking water and sanitation.

So they spend a LOT of money on things like subsidizing purchases of water bottles from private corporations. 
They spend tons of money on trying to fight cholera. 
They spend money on counselors for people who lost their kids to cholera. 
They have expensive doctors on standby to help people who have cholera, so some of them survive. 
They spend money on some kind of sick leave for people with cholera, and re-employment programs to get them back into the work force. 
Employers spend money trying to figure out how to run a business when half the employees might just not show up one day because they all have explosive diarrhea. 
People sell little water purificators, and water treatment tablets. 
People walk on foot to the river to carry water, and then burn animal dung in order to boil it so they can have something to drink.

When you are in a system like that, if you focus in on any single part of it, it’s hard to find waste.

You go and examine the tons of money that is spent on the people who have cholera, and you get something like this:

Turns out, they are spending all the money fighting cholera.

You can go and examine the women who are carrying water on foot, and again, you’ll find very little waste there, they are probably already taking the most direct path.

You can make some TINY improvements.

Switch the women over from carrying traditional clay pots, to cheap plastic crap, that is more polluting, but not as heavy, doesn’t break as easily, and is just cheaper.

So you can save like $2 here and there.

Maybe they can get slightly more efficient stoves, so that they have to burn a little bit less dung in order to boil their water. 
Another 50 cents saved.

But then at the end of the day, since you spent money on consultants and so on to try and find those $2.50, well it’s moot, it ends up having no impact at all, or being completely negligible.

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These women carrying water are not idiots.

They are just… being “rational”, in a free market.

They need water, they figured out the cheapest way for them to get the water, and they do that. If it was less effort to get hired, and then buy water bottles, and they had that option, then they’d do that instead. 
They are already doing everything they can to minimize their costs, and maximize their output.

They’ll switch over to the cheaper plastic buckets so they can carry a bit more water, moved by market incentives.

The guy who is selling water treatment tablets is also just a businessman in a free market. He’s already trying to be as efficient as possible, and keep the rest as profits.

The doctors who are treating cholera are also trying to be efficient. They try to come up with the most effective cures and treatments.

Every little self-centered actor is trying to be as efficient as possible. 
And when you examine them under a microscope… You can’t ever find much waste, only tiny, inconsequential improvements.

In order to even SEE the waste, in order to notice it…

You have to take a step back, and look at the bigger picture.

As soon as you step back, and look at the whole thing… Well suddenly, all of the waste becomes glaringly obvious.

Then you can develop something like a water treatment plant, set up an infrastructure of pipes and sewers, and have clean tap water and toilets.

But in order to be able to even think about something like municipal tap water, you HAVE to take a step back, and look at the bigger picture. 
Because if you look at just ONE of the women who is carrying water… Well then switching her to a plastic bucket makes sense. 
While investing 20 million in a water treatment plant makes no sense at all.

If you look at ALL of the women who are carrying water, then suddenly building an aqueduct or laying pipes makes a lot more sense. 
If you look at all the women carrying water, and also at the trucks carrying water, and also at all the energy that goes into boiling water, and all the money that is spent on doctors who are fighting cholera and so on… 
And then you even zoom out a bit more, and you look at the costs of all that over the next 5 to 10 years?

Well then it becomes incredibly obvious that municipal tap water is needed, that it’s a way more effective solution. 
Suddenly, you can look at the women who are carrying water on foot, and notice that it’s actually a lot of wasted time and effort in the long run.

But to do that, you need to zoom out, you need to look at the bigger picture, to have a central plan, so you can look at ALL of the costs, of the current system, and compare it to the alternative.

Because if you zoom in on the women carrying water… All you can see is how efficient they are with their plastic buckets, and their direct paths. 
If there is a shortcut available to the river, I can guarantee you she is already taking it, she has optimized the path, like any rational actor in a free market would. 
She has already compared the cost of building an aqueduct to the cost of a plastic bucket, and chosen the cheapest most efficient option, that would get her the most bang for her buck.

At a small scale, and in the short term, it’s just cheaper and less work to fetch water with a plastic bucket than to try and build an aqueduct. 
At a small scale and in the short term, municipal tap water or an aqueduct seems wasteful. 
“Years of work, and how much money to build an aqueduct for some water? 
Girl, get a plastic bucket and move your ass to the river like everyone else. It will get you water much faster, cheaper and with less effort.”

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One thing to note, is that cutting down on waste in this way, while insanely profitable for society in the long run, does often require some initial investments. 
You need to actually build the municipal tap water infrastructure. So in the short term, it actually requires spending even more money than before. To then cut down on waste, and save billions down the line

And the other thing is that it would destroy the economy.
Less waste = less work, less money spent. 
All the people employed to apply band-aid fixes end up out of a job if the problem is solved.

It’s a bit like how if you want to move away from private health insurance, and towards universal healthcare, then all of the useless bureaucrats and paper pushers from the private health insurance industry end up unemployed. 
Universal healthcare could eliminate approximately 1.8 million administrative and insurance-based jobs.

If you are wasting money employing people to dig holes and fill them back in, and you want to stop that waste, then the people who were employed doing useless work end up unemployed.

Looking back at the third world country where women are working hard to fetch water on foot, to earn their water…

There are hospitals that have been built, and doctors who are specialized in cholera treatment. 
There are people paid to gather animal dung, and people building little stoves, so the water can be boiled. 
The are businesses selling water purification tablets, and there are businesses selling plastic buckets to carry water.
The CEO of the bottled water company will point out how much extra work there is for everyone, how he’s creating jobs, and how municipal tap water would destroy many of those jobs, as well as much of his wealth and profits.

All the business owners will be marching in the streets, protesting municipal tap water, declaring that government should just stay out of people’s lives, and that central planning of water distribution by the government is a socialist fantasy that can never work.

They’ll talk about free markets, and how the women carrying water in plastic buckets have been lifted out of poverty by capitalism, and that the CEO of the bottled water company is already lifting people out of cholera.

They’ll say that people should just be less lazy and entitled, work a bit harder to boil their water, and then there would be no more cholera.

They’ll declare that if clean water is too expensive for a lot of people, it’s probably just because of some kind of government regulations. 
They’ll say we should stop checking if the plastic buckets are food safe or not, and that way the free market will produce cheaper buckets, and help reduce costs for those women carrying water. 
They’ll blame the high cost of bottled water on workers having too many rights, and too much pollution being outlawed.

They’ll say ANYTHING to try and preserve their wealth and power, their profits, their jobs, their investments.

The people who profit from the waste LOVE the waste. They will block any attempts at reducing waste.

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If you look at this same concept when applied to something like modern day USA, cities who bulldoze away homeless camps are like the women carrying water.

They’ve invested in the bulldozers, in the plastic buckets.

A bulldozer is a very efficient way to clear a homeless camp, very cost effective. 
There isn’t really a cheaper way to push problems out of sight.

There are people cleaning shit off the streets.

With modern equipment, so they can do it efficiently, he’s not scrubbing by hand, he has his plastic bucket.

When homeless people sleep under a bridge, or on a public bench, spikes and stuff are installed.

Very cost effective way to avoid having people sleep there, cheaper than the bulldozers, or paying security guards to come harass the homeless and move them along.

When homeless people who live in shitty unsanitary conditions inevitable get sick and have to be taken to the emergency room, there again, they try to cut down on costs, and be as efficient as possible. 
They’ll stabilize the homeless guy, and then dump him out the back. 
Totally the cheapest and most efficient thing to do in the short term.

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When you zoom in on each individual issue, then it all seems very efficient, everyone is trying to be efficient. 
The homeless have upgraded from building shacks out of corrugated tin and scrap lumber, and are living in modern tents, much more cost effective, they are also trying to optimize, and looking out for their own personal short term interests. They also have switched to plastic buckets.

When you look at just one single homeless person, who is being taken to the hospital… 
Well, actually treating them seems like a waste of money, when they could just be stabilized, and then dumped back on the streets. 
Stabilize and dump is a cheaper, more efficient way to get rid of them.

You start to zoom out a bit, and see that they then remain sick, and then need to be stabilized and dumped again and again, and suddenly it all seems a lot less efficient.

Zoom out a bit more, notice ALL of the money that is spent on the healthcare to stabilize and dump people, the money spent on the bulldozers, and on regularly cleaning up shit from the streets, and the money spent on guards and police and prisons to try and punish the shit out of homeless people, all the money that is spent on repeatedly buying new tents after the old ones get bulldozed away, all the money spent on covering the city in anti-homeless architecture, etc…

And then suddenly, instead of seeing a bunch of stuff that is all very efficient, you are able to notice all of the waste, and come up with much cheaper solutions, like housing first.

Put the guy in a place with a toilet, and then you don’t need to cover the city in spikes, and to have regular bulldozings, and to constantly try and flush the streets because the city itself has become a giant toilet.

Give the guy actual healthcare, to treat the issue and not just stabilize him, and you cut down on costs in the long term. 
If there are mental health issues and addictions, well again, you provide some treatment to help people, and it cuts down on costs drastically in the long term.

You just have to zoom out a bit, look at the bigger picture, and then all of the waste becomes glaringly obvious. 
But you need to do that to see it. Otherwise, you only see efficiency, and never find the waste you are looking for.