Fivethirtyeight is not even remotely bipartisan. It’s hard to forget Nate’s role in spreading propaganda polls last election cycle and his reaction afterwards when it was clear they were all fake.
How can anyone read and conclude that the US is anything other than dying and on life support? Our government is ran by corporations, and it is not going to change. Not to say that we have some cyberpunk future ahead of us - that looks a bit too optimistic at this point. As much as I personally despise communism, it's hard not to admit that the Chinese have a much superior government (not that they're even communist at this point) to our own. Larry Fink and most of his associates should be getting the "Jack Ma treatment".
How can anyone read and conclude that the US is anything other than dying and on life support?
Perhaps by looking outside the window? By walking around your town/city? By driving to nearby locations? By talking to people and asking them about their lives rather than their opinion of the lives of other people they've never met? By trusting what you see more than than drivel spouted by tin-foil hat loons?
I think this post was fair in 2009, where there was no serious discussions (specifically in the US, certainly many parallels in Europe) over a second civil war or balkanization, a growing Marxist movement, etc. But, times have changed dramatically. To some degree people have to “pick a side”, and it may be to a greater degree in the coming decades. Instability looks inevitable. In other words, being “open-minded” and a “free-thinker” is beginning to seem like a whimsical privilege of the fading Pax Americana.
Just wait until smart home/HAR devices become more popular in ~10-20 years. We'll have grids of radar in our homes whose explicit purpose is to track our movements.
It's completely bonkers to claim that "rule of law" in the US protects our privacy from any type of digital intrusion. "cope" might be the right word if you mean "completely ignore/obseqiuously accept our lack of privacy".
Hackers on the internet are lawless because they're in Russia or wherever, but somebody looking through your walls with wifi will be personally present in your street where he's at risk of being caught so it's a completely different kind of risk.
Totally agree about peeping toms. But, if a company gets to spy on you via their devices with impunity, your politicians representing you get pay bumps.
You sound as if you aren’t aware of wifi beam antennas that can connect from about a mile away, or aware that drones can be equipped with multi-array wifi antennas.
I guess I used too extreme an example so you misunderstood. The distinction I'm making is that those things you mentioned put the person doing them at risk of arrest because they must be physically present while hacking from Russia doesn't.
Cellphone jammers are probably a clearer example of cheap tech that can be used covertly but it's illegal and people usually don't.
Another important factor is that they aren't scalable because it takes a human a lot of work to hack only extremely local targets, not a program that can scan computers all over the world automatically.
George’s ideas are interesting to ponder now and then. I’d definitely want to be a billionaire in that system, though, you’d pay pennies on your penthouses split with everyone living below you. If only taxes were that easy to figure out.
Middle class families in single family homes are hoarding a scarce and essential resource. Billionaires in high rises aren’t. The idea is to punish bad behavior and reward good behavior, not to cut down the tall poppies.
In urban area's sure, but I don't think it's fair to call it hoarding in suburban or rural areas. There's tons of land in the US, it's just that there are no homes _right_ next to jobs and restaurants and the culture people want to live in.
Now that I'm remote, I plan to move to a rural area and grow some of my own food in a single family home. I don't think that should be considered hoarding.
Where there’s tons of land, it’s not that valuable. LVT would be low. It would only be punitive to people with a lot of land (per person) in those spots that are valuable because of those restaurants, culture, jobs, etc. nearby.
I don't really disagree with the LVT tax idea, I just want people to be clear about hoarding and single family homes. In regards to pushing single family homes out of high value areas, then LVT does make sense.
That said, I'm a crazy pro individualism and no tax no government guy, so I have no real place in this thread. : p
If you move rural you're not hoarding. If your holding a small single family home in the core of a dense city where lots of jobs are, you are hoarding.
That land would probably serve society better if it had more than a single family dwelling on it, you could have 10 families in walking distance of their jobs rather than one, and 9 families commuting via car.
Well, the hope would be that you would have never become a billionaire in the first place because somewhere along the line that wealth was predicated on holding cheap real estate and collecting rents.
Now, that argument doesn't help with switching too an LVT, but there are other reasons to be optimistic. Taxing Jeff Bezos at any level is worthless in comparison to a) Paying enough UBI that the warehouses would unionize, b) directly expropriating the warehouses into the postal system. (post : IP :: warehouse sku system : content-address based networking).
Basically, trying to account for the power of billionaries and mega corps in monetary terms is a dangerous exercise where they can probably out-loophole you.
Wouldn’t that exacerbate the tech giant problem? Currently their war chests only get opened to vulture up fledgling companies. I’m not saying it can be instantaneously transmuted into gold if the government tried to take more, but I can’t see your proposal alleviating that problem.
And the newspaper's quite refreshingly and frankly open about that fact:
And now we beg to submit the following detail of the plans which we have thoroughly organised to carry into effect these objects of our ardent desires, in the following PROSPECTUS of a weekly paper, to be published every Saturday, and to be called THE ECONOMIST, which will contain— First.—ORIGINAL LEADING ARTICLES, in which free-trade principles will be most rigidly applied to all the important questions of the day—political events—and parliamentary discussions; and particularly to all such as relate immediately to revenue, commerce, and agriculture; or otherwise affect the material interests of the country....
That’s great, and I’m a sea otter because it is so written. Send me a link to the portfolio of everyone who has influence over what gets written and I’ll show you how they decide what to publish.
I'm sorry, but are you agreeing with me that the Economist has a clearly articulated editorial bias or not?
Because quite plainly, they do.
And I would expect that to be exercised through editorial control and directives.
If you think the Economist does NOT have an editorial bias, or a different editorial bias, what is your basis for claiming so, and in the latter case, what is that bias?
You seem to be putting "disagree with dredmorbius" ahead of "express myself clearly". Try the latter.
I’m a bit speechless at this point. I’ve written about 5 posts so far stating that they have a bias, the actual one definitely not clearly articulated, including several you’ve responded to. No offense, I think what I’ve written is clear, but that you may be confused.
Of course! Everything can have a bias - that's well understood. Just because something can have one, doesn't mean it does. If one finds bias in the research methods or data in the article - one can conduct their own study and submit their results. Ironically, the research from Cambridge talks about a bias in the original thesis of "BS jobs".
That would be the The Economist Group, and by extension it's owners. Had it been a stock company with thousands or millions stockholders it would be safer to assume that they most likely doesn't hold that much influence over the editorial content, but I believe The Economist Groups only have a handful stockholders.
Ideally I'd say that "they" are the editors, but we don't know what level of influence the owners have, so "they" could be the Cadbury family.
Yes, I'm familiar. Based on the drivel that comes out of the Economist on a regular basis, I've long made the conclusion that "they" and whomever their close friends are/they vacation with are the "editors". I don't think it's a remarkable claim. I'm not expecting to see any WaPo articles criticizing Amazon anytime soon, either.
Cancel culture is not about canceling people who say racist, misogynist, homophobic, etc things. It is about canceling (read: disenfranchising and taking revenge on) straight white males, who are at the bottom (top? intersection? whichever) of the intersectional hierarchy. Kamau Bobb is not a white male, therefore this does not apply. He is receiving the same treatment that any powerful person, regardless of skin color, would have received 10 years ago in the western world: tuck them away until the scandal blows over.
What? This event seems to match the collectively assigned definition fine.
"Cancel culture or call-out culture is a modern form of ostracism in which someone is thrust out of social or professional circles – whether it be online, on social media, or in person. Those subject to this ostracism are said to have been "cancelled". The expression "cancel culture" has mostly negative connotations and is commonly used in debates on free speech and censorship.
The notion of cancel culture is a variant on the term call-out culture and constitutes a form of boycotting or shunning involving an individual (often a celebrity) who is deemed to have acted or spoken in a questionable or controversial manner." [1]
That definition is neither empirical, nor is it collectively defined. It is selectively assigned and selectively enforced. And here we are, in a thread where the top level post provides an obvious example.
Great, now also link me to a cacophony of Twitter activists who've defined it the same way, I am proven wrong.
But, and of course it's a silly request, can you provide any objective large-scale studies as to who (their demographics) is being canceled, for what categorization, and the net effect of their cancellation? It doesn't matter, granted, because the Wikipedia definition of highly politicized terms is, of course, what counts.
Not quite. It's about ideological alignment and purity. The cancel mob just got Antonio García Martínez fired, for example. And they are constantly trying to cancel Glenn Greenwald, a gay man married to a minority POC, and with minority kids.
I don't know Antonio García Martínez's ethnicity, but he looks and sounds very much like a straight white male, so I would not consider that a counterexample. Also, certainly there are no absolute laws of who is always targeted and who is never, just clear trends.
However, it is true that to some small degree I am oversimplifying something quite complex, partially because the cited example was James D'Amore. Other examples you might cite include Dave Rubin or Ric Grennell. Certainly gay white men and straight white women (specifically if they are Republican) are targeted. What happened at Disney with the treatment of Gina Carano vs. Krystina Arielle is evidence enough of that.
Which charitable person would conclude that was a typo? I have a feeling people like you would say the same thing if he wrote “I hate Jews” in capital letters.
It's obviously intended to be anti-semitic, but I don't understand what it means, either. They're all English words, but I can't parse them in that order.
