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  "map_content": "This recent video from a channel I enjoy called Dive Talk provides a lesson in why you need to hold cash (not because you want to get rich doing nothing). \r\n\r\n*SPOILERS* \n\r\nThe video starts out as a cave diving mishap that turns into a Kafkaesque journey into the health care system trying to get treatment while Woody is dying of the bends. It turns out that the only thing that saved Woody's life was a credit card that issued him a 30 k USD line of credit. DAN, the insurance company, ultimately paid it all back but only because they are famous youtubers. In the comments you can read more horror stories about them that don't have a happy ending. Most of the story after about the half-way point is arguing with people about Woody's need for immediate medical attention. \n\nThe ending is falsely optimistic because DAN adopts new procedures which will prevent this sort of thing from happening in the future. I think we see a denial of economics on the part of the hosts, the same as we see with everybody no matter the cost in human lives, because they seem to see their problem as something isolated and specific to their own situation rather than a general one that is created by the entire model of insurance. Later in the video, Woody says \"Everyone who has paid the subscription should have a right to the health care he needs\" (or something like that). \r\n\r\nHowever, needs are not objective. You can claim to be dying of something but other people may disagree and we won't all know for certain until it's too late. The insurance company wants to save on costs, so they will always expect a high standard of proof. Rules and procedures will never get you out of arguments with an insurance company. You will have no choice but fill out complicated forms and try to get the attention of doctors who don't have time for you. \r\n\r\nAs Mises explained, when you eliminate markets, you get bureaucracy. That is what happens when you try to plan for unexpected problems via a subscription service. When the problem actually happens and you try to go through the insurance company to solve it, then you are not using a market. \r\n\r\nThat is not to say that insurance companies are evil or that insurance is useless. Rather, if you are not holding cash then there is a gap in your security that insurance cannot substitute for. The insurance is only good if the true nature of your situation can be objectively determined, which is not necessarily the case in the moment. On the other hand, if you have cash then all doors open and nobody is worried about whether you actually need anything. \r\n\r\nAs noted, Woody did not have cash he had credit. However, it is easy to see how lines of credit will tend to fail when you need them most too. He was just very fortunate that he had one that worked. Cash does not fail when you need it. \r\n\r\nSurprises will happen to you. Surprises can be good or bad. However if you don't have cash when they happen, they are bad because you can't take advantage of them. Wealth is not the same as cash because if your wealth is tied up in real estate or something then you would have to liquidate it before you could spend it, and you couldn't do that while you were dying of the bends either. \n\nIn this case, Bitcoin would not have helped. Bitcoin would have been an investment that would need to be liquidated before it would be useful. Thus, you don't hold Bitcoin because you want to be ready for unexpected problems. You would hold it because you are speculating that it will, one day, be useful in this sort of situation. If you are like most people and you act like the unexpected will never happen, then you would have no idea why you would need cash. That is why I believed, way back when, that only really intelligent people would be interested in Bitcoin. However, that is not what happened. Instead, they created BTC which could never be useful in this kind of situation. \n\nhttps://youtu.be/O7NsjpiPK7o?si=RY5V_fKmcDAwiN0z",
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  "timestamp": "2024-01-14T23:02:48.000Z",
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