52 karma · joined February 26, 2019
Tech as a sector is still doing very well, even though there are some high publicity mega failures like WeWork
Much more upfront about their pricing structure.
Street crimes have a far different cause and should be treated differently. I'm surprised I even have to type that, it seems obvious.
> So central to capitalist reality is this motor of growth that it lies behind both imperialist conquest and the launching of those periodic prolonged booms of which the Belle Époque and the post-war Golden Age are the most recent examples.
This is a pretty ridiculous conclusion that is demonstrably false.
I wouldn't be so sure. Obviously it would be an uphill battle for the OS to compete in the US or Europe, but anywhere that doesn't have clear smartphone dominance yet (ie most of India or Africa) is fair game. Huawei already has a strong foothold in both of those places, and the Chinese government is not opposed to strong-arming them into sticking with Huawei infrastructure.
1) Store of value 2) Unit of account 3) Medium of exchange
It's not really very good at any these 3 things. The scalability significantly hurts #3, but even if you fix it it's super volatile, which are bad for 1 and 2. Not only that, but it's inherently deflationary, which is quite bad in the long term, but I guess that's really a secondary concern.
Where would you move Google, at this point, if you were in charge? There's not a single city -- in the US, at least -- that I can think of that would be prepared, with the right infrastructure or ready to build out a lot more. That probably factors into Google's decision making process as well.
Maybe we should be going back to the idea of company towns. Or possibly have urban planners building new cities from the ground up with proper infrastructure, housing, transportation, etc. that have the ability to expand for new residents and companies. Certainly the big cities in the US don't have that capability due to our car based infrastructure and our attraction to 30 year mortgages on suburban houses.
Then there's the serious question of where would the industry go? So many cities are so NIMBY controlled in this country (although SF is up there with the worst) that not many places are better.
These privileged "progressives" need to be put in their place politically.
It's not super unreasonable for a city to try to protect its current residents but when an entire country of cities are all protecting their own residents that country is much worse off.
Our best studies have shown immigration increases overall welfare. The Mariel Boatlift studies are a good example of this: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2523702?seq=1#page_scan_tab_con...
https://www.minneapolisfed.org/publications/the-region/where...