SapphireSun

If college is part of a signaling arms race, if we conceive of education purely as a labor market good, why are we asking the laborers to stand down from that race and not the employers?

Scientists are running because they feel their class interests are being threatened. Typically, scientists are apolitical because they feel they get more benefits by maintaining the status quo (e.g. military and civil funding). In the face of a bald attack on the EPA and climate science, scientists are attempting to show class solidarity.

Unfortunately, many of the problems we have are not technical problems, but are clashes between left and right. The favored positions of both sides have long been established. Science will help implement an ideological solution, but will not replace ideology. To the extent that the scientists running are leftists compared with centrist democrats, this will be somewhat significant.

However, I suspect that many established scientists are ignorant of politics and see the current struggle as some kind of surface level fact vs fiction debate. They will be disappointed.

I agree with points 1-3, but I would be remiss not to mention, that with respect to point 4, diseases like sickle cell anemia, which is hideously painful and fatal as a double inheritance (25% homozygous offspring in a heterozygous pairing, ss), but a wonderful defense against malaria in heterozygous offspring (Ss, 50% of said pairing). The remaining 25% homozygous wild-type (SS) are healthy, except when encountering malaria.

https://www.cdc.gov/malaria/about/biology/sickle_cell.html

I would think that a mendelian genetic disease like sickle cell might well be on our hit list for all the trouble it causes. Of course, it could be argued that mosquito nets and drugs (i.e. technology) are a better, less costly defense, than these inborn genetic mutations.

My apologies dang. I try to at least be on topic, and this is what has been intensely interesting to me in the past year. Thanks for moderating.

Mainly because it's hard to suppress laughter if you think about it at all beyond a surface level. See discussion in another thread. I don't want to repeat myself.

Ok, last one. :) You've really just made a mockery of the ideology of competition haven't you? In fact, that is what corporations do. There's an awful lot of highly concentrated market power lying around for exactly that reason.

There are a variety of alternative arrangements that have been proposed. Economic democracy is one of them (that is, the workers control the company via elections, which will influence their pay).

The workers benefit somewhat from Apple, yes, in the form of a consumer gadget. I will grant Apple some utility, it did find a way to fuse existing science and technology in an interesting way to produce a very nice pocket computer.

However, this has had many effects, some good (access to information and maps), some bad (dissolution of privacy, addictive interfaces, the creation of "apps" at the expense of the open internet). Apple then uses this commodity to vacuum up dollars from consumers in excess of what it cost to produce... and do nothing with them other than allow executives and securities holders to slake their desire to accumulate. It's an addiction in itself.

Your reference to the double Irish arrangement completely undercuts your point. You admit that they aren't paying substantial taxes in a huge market they participate in.

With respect to Japan and China, a multinational company, an effectively stateless entity (or possibly a state unto itself) can simply move to the most profitable country, thus forcing countries to compete for its tax dollars. Thus, the multinationals, unless resisted via solidarity, will cause a collapse in all nations treasuries.

You have the right idea. That's probably what they will do, but not as a dividend (those are taxed as ordinary income). Instead they will buy back stock, reducing the supply of stock and increasing the price. Long term sales of stock incur a 15% tax rate.

I'm not saying this is good, but this is what they will do.

If they don't really need that money, why not give it to the people that could really use it?

I'm suggesting that capitalism is going to encounter a crisis point sometime in the next decade or two at this rate. It will destroy itself leaving either barbarism or socialism in its wake.

Exactly right. Why would a for-profit company work to improve the lives of the population that birthed them? I'm merely making the point that we can do better than this.

Yet somehow they managed to avoid paying much tax elsewhere as well. Strange.

Apple lobbied for and received an incredible tax break for repatriating its money. It should be paying the full 35% corporate tax rate. Apple invests in some science and technology, that is true. However, for some reason, despite its fervent dedication to the arts and sciences, it hasn't figured out how to spend 200+ billion dollars. Weird.

Imagine if that money didn't accumulate in the hands of a few and instead continuously circulated...

U6 is still high. Most of the jobs created after 2008 were more transient than old jobs. Hence, the term "gig economy". The precariousness of the working class has increased dramatically and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

Paying their taxes and investing in technology and scientific progress would help workers even more.

All of their profits is what the socialist would respond. :) They produce nothing without the working class. Managers can earn a modest salary.

This is a diversion tactic.

They're grabbing 252.3B and spending less than a fifth of it. Let's imagine a different world. 200B, divided by 50k + 1.5x overhead (75k) could create about 2.6M decent jobs for one year (or 1.3M for two years etc).

2.6M jobs is equal to 0.8% of the total US population. The total labor force size is about 160M (~1/2 the total population) and the U6 measure of unemployment is about 8%. A healthy U6 is probably closer to 6% (from around 2000). That 2% of 160M is 3.2M jobs. Thus, in one fell swoop without even affecting operations overly much, Apple could reduce the magnitude of the economic crisis by a little over 2/3.

These are astonishing numbers that would have real impacts on people's lives. Imagine what we could do with the profits of the other large conglomerates.

Instead, they're spending a tiny amount on PR and reduced taxes that they lobbied heavily for to do what? Probably stock buy backs. The adulation of the rich and powerful continues at the expense of the working class.

EDIT: added some comparison numbers

EDIT: You guys are too much! So many questions, keep on asking, but I'll have to let others answer. I have other things to do today. Keep thinking critically about the political economy of the system. :)

It's kind of unbelievable that NPM is a for-profit company that serves the node community for free. You can't possibly expect them to make the right choices when the community isn't whom they are directly responsible to. NPM should be a nonprofit foundation, a coop, or some other organization that has its operations funded by the community and has elected positions.

Their lack of financial or other interests in the community directly explains their policies.

How do you go from knowing the location of memory to actually doing an attack if the memory is read protected? That's the part I don't get.

Just FYI, you're describing socialism and there is a large body of theory that you can read about that discusses these ideas. It even takes into account the mistakes of the mid-20th century.

Here's a really nice introduction.

https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/pamphlets/capitalism-soc...

I don't know in detail, but suffice it to say that for many years we've had mouse strains with particular genetic alterations that appear to mimic Alzheimer's. Not my field, so google for more info.

GP's literal words were "stop voting for people willing to take lobbyist money". The lobbyists and big donations / bundlers come from the same class of people - the wealthy. These dollars come attached with policy positions that favor that class both explicitly (in terms of policies that are explicitly favored) and implicitly (policies that will not be given strong support, i.e. various forms of redistribution).

The only way to run a modern political campaign is with lots of cash, so the cash must be procured somehow. Your two options are to level the playing field with public funding of campaigns (unlikely to happen in the wake of Citizen's United) or for a candidate to raise small dollar donations. The Sanders campaign proved that the latter is possible.

That is true, but the 535 other politicians are nearly all centrists or right wingers. Politicians are beholden to their donors. Eliminate the elite donor class, eliminate their interests being represented. I have some optimism that the Democratic party will be reconfigured to some degree. It's either that, or keep losing cyclically.

FDR won four presidential elections and scared the right so badly that they got a constitutional amendment to limit future "damage" to two terms.

Yea, Jeff Sessions is a libertarian. /s

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/07/20/jeff-sess...

You can only say that without knowledge of the Bernie Sanders campaign. Prior to that I'd have agreed with you. It was tremendously successful at fundraising from small dollar donations by pushing policies that benefit the many over the few. I don't see a reason why other campaigns can't pick that up and run with it.

Noam Chomsky on the survival of human civilization. The talk might have actually occurred in 2016.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mrE5EZr5ZVY

Sorry, I realized that after I posted, but I disagree with the framing (based on my interpretation of the word "drain") that using them is inherently a bad thing or that they should be rationed in some way.

Retirement isn't a drain, it is a social service. Unless you are wealthy, you cannot retire without corporate or government social insurance plans like pensions, social security, paid off mortgages, medicare, etc. Without these plans, we go back to the Dickensian past where the poor and old slept on the streets or in workhouses until they died.

Some might even say retirement is the goal of life, defined however the individual wants to define it.

I'm starting to believe that landlords just shouldn't exist. What is the benefit to society? We grant them the right to exclude others from the land, enforced by police, merely so they can benefit. The cost of the house is often less than the land! In that fashion, they are merely holding intellectual property. If tenants didn't have to pay the bank or a landlord they could often easily afford basic repairs by saving up, and we could run a public insurance program to help them do so.