Overton-Window

Although social programs are better in Germany, that isn't the entire story. You'll see thousands of homeless strewn through the parks and along the banks of the Spree in the summer and U-Bahn stations in the winter. The major difference is the authorities dismantle and move any tent cities before they become endemic, unlike California. Belligerent behaviour is usually dealt with, meaning those that remain on the streets are predominantly harmless.

For comparison: there are single neighbourhoods in California with >36k homeless. Congregation is the real issue.

They are misleading as they include hundreds of thousands of unsheltered refugees.

Anyone who has ever walked around SF or LA and Berlin knows this implicitly. The US cooks the books.

https://www.feantsaresearch.org/download/germany241169298614...

Those stats are misleading, e.g. Germany's figures include unsheltered refugees. Excluding refugees the number of homeless people in Germany sits at 335,000 to 420,000.

https://homelessworldcup.org/homelessness-statistics/

Unions reward and protect unproductive employees at the cost of productive and prospective employees. For the employer, this results in subpar capital allocation and fragility to future market forces.

Programming is the conversion of ambiguous human requirements into machine readable instructions. To automate, computers would need to understand ambiguous human requirements. This is AGI.

By comparison, brick laying is trivial.

Further, those same demographic changes are taking place elsewhere too, e.g. take the fertility rates of Native (Christian) and Muslim European populations and project forward a few decades. Lebanon is but a proverbial canary.

Nothing says in-person collaboration like mask mandates. Why even bother reopening campuses?

Much like in TikTok.

Because progressive governments all over the world dropped the ball too. Didn't hear anyone attributing Australia's success to the conservative government when the country was being heralded as a miracle just a few months ago.

Yes, the conservative governments of Israel and the UK who overlooked mass vaccine rollouts did do a great job.

> The states that "beat" COVID are currently led by progressive parties

No. The states that dropped the ball on COVID were the progressive states. They only "beat" COVID in the sense they let it run rampant in the first place. Australia's red state equivalents have all handled COVID near flawlessly.

> Craigslist killed newspapers (it took their ad revenue) Citizen journalism hasn't replaced that; buzzfeed-style sites did.

Craigslist killed classified ads (in the US). Twitter and Substack replaced investigative pieces, leaving legacy media companies reduced to peddling outrage for clicks.

> Hollywood is thriving.

The Golden Globes are over. Last year's Emmys saw the lowest viewership of any Emmy ceremony in the Television Academy’s history[1]. COVID killed the cinema[2]. AI is diminishing any production advantages that remain.

> Blockchains have produced nothing of worth, especially if you consider anything outside of cryptocurrency (but let's be real, cryptocurrency is also worthless)

That's demonstrably untrue given Bitcoin has a market cap larger than all but 20 countries[3]. Blockchains allow, for the first time in history, humans to coordinate at scale without human intermediaries. Only dead weight bureaucrats, machiavellian statists, and the innumerate who have been sold lies from the former would argue that blockchains are worthless.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/21/emmys-2020-primetime-awards-...

[2] https://www.boxofficemojo.com/weekly/

[3] https://fiatmarketcap.com/Country

Math is more trustworthy than the state. One of the few things both Democrats and Republicans can agree on is the state of the Bitcoin ledger.

Political representation becomes obsolete with blockchains that can facilitate a referendum on every issue without the need for centralised trust.

You have three ways to vote:

1. With your ballot: very small chance of changing policies (1 vote)

2. With your wallet: small chance of changing policies (n votes through political donations)

3. With your feet: guaranteed chance of changing policies

The internet facilities 100% democracy as it simplifies voting with your feet (remote work, social networks), allowing likeminded individuals to congregate and influence policy. Blockchain furthers this, unlocking the ability to have a referendum on every issue, which maximises consent.

The internet will kill most every institution that predated it. Citizen journalism killed media. Netflix/YouTube killed Hollywood. Blockchains will replace 51% democracy with 100% democracy.

Dying inherited institutions are grasping to stay relevant with appeals to authoritarianism. Free speech is now a hinderance and a liability to their existence. As their relevance dwindles, tyranny becomes their only tool.

And private DMs in certain cases as well. The argument doesn't hold water.

The quality of mainstream journalism is dwindling as those institutions can only stay relevant by manufacturing outrage. The BBC now reads like BuzzFeed.

That's not argument for censorship, rather an argument for eschewing (or outlawing) algorithmic timelines.

I can imagine the state of your country if Musk and Jobs would be considered toxic there.

> in a respectable publication like the Washington Post, WSJ, NYT, Economist, etc

Your assessment is a decade out of date.

Why must you waive your right to legal recourse?

Wouldn't you think there'd be numerous examples of such arbitrage in the wild if so?

Repurpose commercial real estate into residential, leaving ground floor retail intact. Housing shortage eliminated.

Reddit was just a bellwether. Honest and curious discussion no longer exists. You either repeat party lines or are labeled a deplorable and should be banned from society.

History shows us where this leads.

> You're forgetting the number 1 law of large numbers. Things that have a very low chance of probability happen all the time at scale.

Severe reactions to experimental vaccines for example?