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by goo 2347 days ago
The thing is, everyone _could_ get a pony, if we decided that doing so was a priority. Ponies cost about $1000.

If it mattered enough, the US government could ABSOLUTELY afford $330 billion to get everyone a pony.

It's not that tremendous things aren't possible, it's that we aren't doing them.
1 comments
bzbarsky 2347 days ago
Not to take away from your main point, but the capitalized total cost of ownership for a pony is _much_ larger than $1000 (which, by the way, is the price for a not-very-good-natured pony; breeds with nice temperaments cost a lot more according to https://pets.costhelper.com/pony.html ).

Doing some quick checking, food for a pony is ~$1-2k per year. Lodging is $2-3k per year. Basic preventative veterinary care is $1k per year; if the pony gets old this could get a lot more.

That's $4-6k a year for upkeep, and ponies live for 20+ years. So the actual cost of a pony, even with discounting and whatnot for future dollars, is probably at least $50k, not $1k.

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goo 2347 days ago
If you really think through the implications of every individual in America owning a pony, it gets a lot more interesting than that! It means that everyone in every city would own a pony -- would that mean that perhaps a proxy ownership situation would occur, where you had a certificate of pony ownership, but the pony would be housed and maintained anywhere in the country that could do so cheapest? It would cost a lot more than 2-3k/year to house a pony in NYC! Let alone the sudden demand for housing about 5 million of them...

My guess is that these ponies would be kept in horrible conditions similar to the way domesticated cattle are raised for milk and meat. I would hazard that all of our assumptions about the actual price of ponies and maintenance would come down if we all needed to have a pony, and would come down by a LOT.

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bzbarsky 2346 days ago
Well, yes, the "there aren't 330 million ponies in the US, and if there were, where would we keep them?" problem is definitely a problem too!
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s1artibartfast 2347 days ago
Not to mention the costs to offset the carbon impact of the pony's feed.
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