And the money is actually from the Insurance industry, whose goal is to drive down utilization while driving up fee-for-service. This way, they make a little money on non-insured procedures but make a shit load of money by keeping more of the insurance premium. It's messed up... (I work in the dental industry, and see practices getting bought by DSO's, PEs and VCs only to go from $1M / chair / year to 50k / chair / year. all the time).
They're starting to break the code on it, but there are concrete docks that Rome built 2000 years ago that still exist today - we have trouble building salt resistant concrete docks that last ~100 years.
Apparently it has to do with using a certain type of volcanic ash in the concrete...
We've known for a good while how Roman concrete works. The reason that nobody uses it is that the economic incentives aren't there. Roman concrete is more annoying to work with and takes way, way longer to usefully solidify than cheap modern concrete. Yes, it will last longer, but almost nobody these days cares about paying through the nose for a building that will last more than 100 years when you could just force future generations to pay to rebuild it when it collapses.
It's a test of intergenerational commitment, because you are asking the generation that bears the cost of construction to build something that benefits many future generations. But the future generations, even though they enjoy all those beautiful old buildings provided to them by their ancestors, are tempted to go cheap for the building they need to build themselves.
So as people become disconnected from the great chain of being that connects your ancestors to you and you to your descendants, they start to build ugly, disposable buildings.
Perhaps one approach might be to provide lower interest rates to buildings based on the expected life and maintenance cost. So a building that is expected to last 500 years would have a much lower annual interest burden than a building expected to last 70 years. That would require some type of government guarantee for the 500 year bond.
> we have trouble building salt resistant concrete docks that last ~100 years
Because of failures in technology/ability, or lack of incentive/motivation? It isn't obvious to me that anyone cares to build long-lasting structures..
Spent three years an eight months working in retail hell, and this was exactly what the company pushed employees to do - they were kind enough to sell shares to employees at a 10% discount but you had to be crazy, grossly miseducated or drank a bit too much of the kool-aid to believe that this organization was a good value store.
Total tangent, I used to have the Office 365 subscription but canceled it, yet I can still use word/excel - I've just lost access to the cloud features which I wasn't using to begin with - I would have thought they'd disable my version of word/excel but when I canceled it did not happen.
Blame the insurance companies - most major insurance companies use your SSN as a mechanism for identifying the patient. The member ID #'s can be used but it's quicker to just input the SSN.
The cold war was ended by the Strategic Defense Initiative - not because it worked but because we forced the USSR to pour resources into matching us and it bankrupted the country.
