I don't know if they were being sarcastic, but I'm willing to argue for the position.
There are life altering medical conditions that can make you go blind, for that "vision coverage" as part of medical coverage makes sense. I'm excluding that from the below because by "vision coverage" most people mean "insurance for routine checkups and purchasing glasses".
For routine eye appointments and glasses - their is no high unexpected costs that need to be spread out over a large population. The costs are low and predictable. The majority of the population needs them. So the typical benefit of insurance doesn't exist - i.e. you aren't spreading large unexpected costs over a large number of people so they average out to a small consistent cost.
Meanwhile insuring these things just means that the people purchasing the product no longer have an incentive to keep the price down, and adds bureaucracy, both of which increase the cost without providing a better service.
So - why do you need vision coverage?
I'll acknowledge some counter arguments exist. Encouraging people to get frequent enough eye appointments, spreading the cost of bad eyesight to the minority of people who don't need eyeware, if government supported - subsidizing the basic need of eyeware for poor people, etc. You can make an argument in the other direction to, but I don't think either argument is obviously better, and in the end which side you agree with basically comes down to what your politics are like.
Software engineering and white collar work in general are very visual-heavy professions. It is absurd not to include health coverage as part of compensation when the job involves 40+ hours a week of staring at computer screens. It is also ridiculous that vision and dental insurance are bundled separately from "medical" coverage, but that is a different issue.
I'm assuming your total compensation is the same either way. So it's not that you're not being compensated for staring at computer screens all days, it's just a question of whether your being compensated by being given dollars or being compensated by your eye doctor and glasses manufacturer being given dollars.
Upon rereading your post, your point makes more sense. But don't you at least get discounts on the exams and eyewear? I would assume there's some justification for why vision insurance exists beyond the serious conditions you mention, and thus be an additional benefit from employers of workers who experience ocular wear and tear all day.
You get fake discounts off egregiously inflated eye exam/eyewear prices
You can easily buy prescription glasses online for less than $20 a pair, and you can get an eye exam done for $50-$100
If you use your vision insurance to buy glasses in person, though, good luck getting them for less than $150. The price of the glasses magically inflates to whatever your insurance will cover.
If my vision insurance weren't bundled with my employment as a "free" benefit I'd definitely just use $80 out of my HSA to pay for an eye exam and then buy a sack of glasses online
Throwing out the "perk" of providing free performance enhancing drugs to their employees means their average employee will become less effective, either because they won't be on performance enhancing drugs or because they will be spending time walking around to get performance enhancing drugs instead of working. So the average employee is making less money for the company, so they are payed less, not more.
In numbers it goes something like they can pay you and extra buck a day for not having the coffee machine, but they simultaneously have to cut your pay 10 bucks a day for the loss in productive work being done. Your 9 bucks a day and free coffee down in the exchange.
Not true. People have been migrating from place to place for all of recorded history. Cultural homogeneity is nothing more than a "good ole days" fallacy; it's never really been a thing anywhere, except in the most remote parts of the world.
Look at the "Population by country of birth 1900-2016" graph for Sweden [1]. It is at ~100% in 1900, and ~82% in 2016.
The US went from 87.9% white in 1900, to 72.4% in 2010 [2]. Unfortunately, I couldn't find such demographic histories for other countries. But search for "US/Europe becoming more diverse", and you'll find countless articles, from mainstream publications, asserting this. So to claim otherwise is extremely fringe.
And there is mathematically no way for a place to be becoming more diverse, while keeping historically constant migration. If the migration hadn't changed in some way, then it would already be diverse. It also means that, if it's becoming more diverse, that it was less diverse, i.e. more homogeneous, in the past.
Looking at the present, China is 91.6% ethnically Han [3], and Hungary is 93.5% ethnically Hungarian [4]. So unless you think China or Hungary or US in 1900-1970 are "the most remote parts of the world", then no, homogeneity is provably not a fallacy.
So yes, "People have been migrating from place to place for all of recorded history", but both the rate and nature of this migration changed, and just a quick glance at the headlines of virtually any news source is enough to tell you this.
So your thesis is ~100 years ago was some freak historical period when countries were mostly homogeneous (compared to current day. Please don't cite e.g. Czechs and Slovaks living in the same country as diversity comparable to current day), but throughout the rest of history, diversity was much greater.
Do you have sources to back this up? And how did those countries become homogeneous, then?
How do you think all those European Americans got there?
And, modern nation states are very new. For example, France drove to extinction or near extinction all languages besides French spoken in what is now present day France through government policy. Like the language of Bretagne.
Your profound misunderstanding of history is not something I can rectify with citations. Read a book? Like, a scholarly book.
The crisis was created by Obama's DOJ breaking decades old precedent and allowing asylum claims for local crime or safety problems. This opened the floodgates so to speak. Before then valid grounds for asylum claims were (mostly) limited to the threat of harm caused by a government.
Recently, Trump's DOJ reverted policy back to the way had been for decades. This has reduced the incentive to send women and children first because domestic violence/crime are no longer grounds for asylum claims.
You don't need to read much ancient literature to know that beards have always been associated with manliness. Going out on a limb here, but my guess is that's because typically only adult men can grow them. Shocking I know.
Anyway, it's not particular to the Renaissance at all.
