When people keep voting for politicians pushing “science is woke” and who are actively thwarting science based policies, this is the outcome they sign up for, whether they like it or not.
The unfortunate part is that the children victims in this flood had no direct say in these decisions. How many of these devastating events will it take before people start believing in science based facts again? Looking at the never ending series of school shootings in the US, may be never.
American Capitalism, with its abundance of neoliberalism, works on the premise that given no external involvement, the market will take care of itself. Companies will make products that people like, or will be out competed.
The American dream extends from that idea that workers can work wherever they want and have completely free movement. So if someone is smart or a hard worker, they have plenty of opportunities and will eventually be successful.
In reality, neither of the above are true. Markets are not capable of taking care of themselves, e.g., because there is inertia, inelasticity, and barrier to entry for many high-capital businesses. Government has propped up most “desirable” large industries through heavy subsidies and tax breaks, like oil, farming, telecom, and tech. Workers do not have free movement, some from self inertia to want to stay close to roots, family, friends, but mostly from the same neoliberal policies that remove social safety nets and fail to provide everyone the basic necessities.
Add to that the fact that a solely money based capitalist system has no ability to measure environmental degradation, wealth inequality, or population satisfaction. And the government is more than happy to step in when it’s businesses being hurt vs people - think too big to fail or propping up businesses during covid/after natural disasters.
Even if a true capitalist system were allowed to exist, it is ultimately anti-competitive. A business in a segment that’s doing well will slowly acquire other businesses in the segment to become a monopoly. Eventually the monopoly will keep growing and acquire the largest businesses in other segments. Besides regulations, technology disruptions can break this cycle but those are fairly rare, and are mostly a recent and likely short lived phenomenon.
Finally, capitalism requires economy and population to keep growing, in the absence of which, there is complete stagnation of movement and the system will collapse into feudalism, like what happened during the Dark Ages.
Anyway, I think you are both right and wrong. Capitalism as people imagine it to be feeds into the ideal of the American Dream. But both true capitalism and its reality actively thwart it, by closely interlinking the economic system with the political.
I wouldn’t combine NYT and NPR in the same category. NPR has been broadcasting a lot of stories about Israeli attacks on Gaza civilians in both their news and long form podcasts.
The human elements are being stripped away along with consumer protections. So services are becoming more and more like the tech sector (like YouTube, WhatsApp blocking) where for a long time, the situation has been that decisions get made by an algorithm and there is literally no one to appeal to about them.
Take banking as an example - with brick and mortar locations shrinking, it’s already so hard to get simple things done unless you download their app, agree to an unnecessarily long list of terms and conditions which can be changed unilaterally at any time, and your rights to sue are waived in favor of arbitration.
We as consumers are doing more of the work that was previously being done by employees and without getting paid for it. Think self checkouts - when it started, I was very happy that I didn’t have to talk to a person if I didn’t feel like it, but now I am essentially forced to use it because there are few to no cashiers. And I’m not getting paid to do the work for which an employee was previously getting paid, nor am I paying less for my groceries as a result of doing the work myself.
Why is Bhutan one of the most weird countries? Oh, WIRED.
It would be so cool if we could generate the entire amount of future energy usage all at once and just store it. May be we could launch the energy store in space and place it so that, let’s say it takes about 8 minutes for the energy to reach us.
After seeing all the things that Orange is doing both in his first and new terms, Biden’s term feels like a lame Presidency with just complaints about how Republicans wouldn’t allow him to accomplish his agenda. His entire spiel during the election was to save America from another fascist president, and he did the complete opposite by giving away the country to a herd of fascists. History will remember him as the enabling President for fascism.
It’s been 8 years of the lesser evil with Democrats and I’m sick of them. I cannot in good conscience support them any longer because they have time and again chosen to maintain the status quo.
The Biden administration did many things to help Americans, most notably the Inflation Reduction Act and the student debt forgiveness. But most of it is being dismantled by the current administration. And the Dems knew this would be the case. Yet they chose to go the executive order route or the highly diluted down IRA. It’s not the people’s problem that you cannot get your party members in line. Why would we vote for you if you cannot deliver?
Nancy Pelosi chose not to even allow the bill to prevent members of Congress from insider trading. Republicans are using it to line their pockets like never before. You want to have your cake and eat it too. Well the people are sick of your hypocrisy and it showed in the elections.
It’s been more than a month of rapid fire gutting of the US government. What has the party done as the main opposition besides “coming up with a strategy”? Because it’s impossible to do anything meaningful without revealing how much you have gained from the system.
The Democrats who truly care about change need to spin off their own party. That’s the only way enough people will be mobilized to make a meaningful difference in the next elections.
No immigrant rapists or criminals* except when they have moola for me and my nazi thugs.
I can see a company not wanting to invest resources in a social media platform without critical mass. But for a company that itself is trying to gain critical mass, moving away from a similarly situated privacy focused platform is idiotic. It signals to potential Proton users that the company cannot be trusted and it’s very hard to recover from that.
Not only is it perfectly legal but the executives would argue that they are bound by their fiduciary duty to their shareholders. Layoffs increase stock price => shareholders make money => shareholders approve bonus for executives.
Any research into immigrants’ impact on economy has found that they benefit the local economy. Moreover when immigrants are picked up by ICE, e.g., during Obama presidency, research also found that jobs didn’t increase and incomes were stagnant.
Check out this book, if you want to look at the research yourself: The Truth About Immigration by Zeke Hernandez
From the excerpt:
Skeptics fear that newcomers compete economically with locals because of their similarities and fail to socially assimilate because of their differences. You’ll see that it’s exactly the opposite: newcomers bring enduring economic benefits because of their differences and contribute positively to society because of their similarities.
Depending on the state you live in, and whether the lease specifically mentioned taking special care of the hardwood floors, this could very well be considered regular wear and tear. There does not appear to be intentional damage here.
The landlord will also need to provide documentation prior to getting work done if they want you to cover the bill, at which point you’ll have the option to contest it.
Check out tenant rights for your state to verify. Hopefully, you’ll also be more careful with hardwood floors in the future. Couches on wheels are no-bueno.
Since Reagan’s neoliberal policies, Republicans have created a vicious cycle of: government inefficient so reduce funding -> not enough resources to hire good talent and provide services -> government inefficient so reduce funding.
IRS is the perfect example where they can only afford to go after the mid-income, while the wealthy get to openly dodge taxes.
All this while promoting the idea that the private sector can do it better, which has led to increasing inequality in resource access, and has only contributed to more money in the pockets of executives and those same Republicans.
We need someone like FDR again to expand government programs and show how good a well run government can be for everyone. Current Democratic leadership’s half assed policies only help to reduce their favorability because neither the left nor the right is happy.
A better suggestion would be to organize and form a union.
When a company is employing more than 10k people, they are clearly 1. a major source of jobs, and 2. going to find your replacement in a blink while you struggle through countless leetcode interviews.
The article only mentions US patent. Hopefully that is mainly to preserve their IP in the US and later perhaps few other high income countries.
Many in the global south will come up with diy knockoffs in an eye blink if WBR tries to make it too expensive to manufacture locally.
I think the phenomenon is called something like “closing the door behind you.”